Tight, interlocking rhythms. Raw microtonality etched on the edges of a pitch. Repetition of a phrase until it melts. A palette of guitar, drums, saxophone, and electronics. Freedom found in limitation; wildness unearthed in the frenzy of a really good riff teetering on the edge of explosion.
That’s Horse Lords, if I were able to bottle up their unbridled energy into four imperfect sentences. In their decades of making music together, from the Baltimore underground all the way to Berlin, the band’s sound has been defined by these core tenets: complex rhythm, grid-like patterning, and rough-edged tonality. Rarely have they strayed from this formula, only have they made it faster, more complicated, with each release. I personally do not tire of this compositional style — though, funnily enough, my favorite Horse Lords release is their version of Julius Eastman’s Stay On It — but this is a band characterized by a sense of adventure, of ever-changing possibility. And so, for what feels like the first time in a long time, Demand to be taken to Heaven Alive! takes a new approach to the tried-and-true Horse Lords mathematics. There’s the obvious addition of new instruments: vocals, trombone, and bass clarinet. But there’s the less obvious shifts as well: the slower pace and the phrases that meander, roaming entirely away from the strictness of previous melodic writing. But the best new element is the mysterious, droning force that runs as an undercurrent throughout the album. The band’s tools have always been a means to find a sense of elation, and in the glimmer of the drone, they find it, stronger, louder, more hopeful than ever.
Despite being jam-packed with ideas, this is an unhurried album, which in itself feels like a new path for Horse Lords. This time around, you can hear all the details and how each is placed with utmost precision. A slightly slower tempo reveals a groovier sound. The buzzing bassline throughout, and prominently featured underneath soaring drones on “Second Galactic Utopia,” offers more of a jam-band psychedelic flow less than a Reichian proposition. Electronics often feel lighthearted, bouncing and bubbling or racing through space like a comet. It’s from that course the entire record unfolds, gradually, carefully, and with a real sense of wonder.
Demand to be taken to Heaven Alive! doesn’t shy away from its new factors, and, like with any experiment, some work better than others. The least compelling moments are those in which the new elements feel like additions to the already established Horse Lords sound, not their own being. The album opens with Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor’s entangled vocals, singing Medieval polyphony filtered through the lens of modern autotune; they’re mimicking the quintessential Horse Lords rhythm, not yet untethered and left to do their own thing. When the band’s familiar sound enters beneath, it’s a welcome return. But over time, vocals get choppier, funkier; take the blips that are interspersed between lightning-like electronics and blaring free saxophone on “A City Yet to Come,” for example. During this track, everything shatters and the idea of the Horse Lords album bursts into something new, something freer, looser, yet still rooted in an energetic, unending pulse.
But the best moments come when the drones arrive, soaring like spaceships as they launch into the sky. Long-held tones stack on top of each other throughout standout track “Before the Law,” swarming over a continuous syncopation and seesawing between slabs of dissonance and airy consonance. In these drones there’s a real sense of possibility, of the never-ending future splayed out in front of us. Another highlight, “After the Last Sky,” finds an even gnarlier drone and melodic force, dissolving the Horse Lords rhythm into a tangle of dissonance and then a sweet release. In these moments, the band finds that utopia they’re always looking for: one born from the catharsis of newfound harmonic exploration.
Though Horse Lords is a virtuosic band, and all those techniques and musical ideas are cool for the nerds among us (myself included), what has always mattered most to me is how all of those ideas add up to a whole much larger than my own sensibilities. I call it release up above; I call it catharsis, too. Music theory and composition become a way to get to some ethereal other universe. Heaven’s a place on Earth, isn’t it? Something we can reach out to, imagine, hold, if only we had the mental fortitude to get there. There’s something special about a band that makes music meant to transport, but really is taking us to a place that already exists in our collective imagination, a heightened, joyful reality we can conjure from somewhere deep inside. Horse Lords invites us again and again to take a step inside that world within a world, and once there, to find our own path to ecstasy.