When Dimitri Giannopoulos was a teenager, he thought he might be living in a dream. Alienated, anxious, and unsettled, he tried his hardest to process a world that he felt disconnected from. “I refused to believe anything I was seeing was happening to me or even happening at all,” he told Allston Pudding in 2016. “I was just freaked out by everything.” He says that he’s since outgrown his existential angst, but similar feelings have clearly found a home in the slow-moving gloom of the songs he makes in Horse Jumper of Love.
The forms of those songs have shifted occasionally over the years—from hushed, stripped-down recordings that recall Phil Elverum’s sky-gazing folk songs to distressed lo-fi experiments in the mold of Bedhead’s desperate slowcore to the odd Siamese Dream cover—but they’re all united by Giannopoulos’ oblique approach to songwriting. His lyrics are vivid but fragmented and opaque; he frequently sounds like someone describing a dream as their eyes slowly open.
On the band’s new album Disaster Trick, Giannopoulos often does just that. He recalls or references dreams in four separate songs, and throughout the record, his writing is similarly disorienting and enigmatic. On opener “Snow Angel,” he sings of funerals and drownings, of looming evil and a desire to be alone. Elsewhere he meditates on emptiness, witnesses bloodbaths, and remembers, through a haze, an argument that went too far. It’s hard to piece together concrete narratives, but his cryptic koans and foggy memories have a strangely affecting power.
For all the uncertainty and malaise reflected in the lyrics, Disaster Trick is full of some of the band’s most focused and direct arrangements. The component parts of each track are the same: languorous guitar lines from Giannopoulos and weighty contributions from the rhythm section of drummer James Doran and bassist John Margaris. But the band has more focus and purpose this time around. Giannopoulos says it’s the first time they’ve ever actually approached the recording process with a clear head, rather than “just show up at a studio, drink, and record,” and it shows—murky as the lyrics may be, the playing is grounded and crushing.
The snowblind shoegaze dirge of “Snow Angel” taps into a new kind of heaviness for the band. And even when they operate in more familiar, slowcore-inspired modes, as on the leaden “Wait by the Stairs,” they bring compelling new elements to their sound. That song’s sludgy arpeggios and trudging rhythms are ballasted by airy harmonies from Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman; the deliberate ornamentation feels like a genuine innovation for a band that’s often favored more spartan arrangements.
With Disaster Trick, Horse Jumper of Love subtly expand their sound without losing the instinctual, otherworldly interplay of their melodies, dizzying guitar lines and serpentine rhythms blurring together in a narcotic ooze. It’s a fitting accompaniment, as ever, for Giannopoulos’ somnambulant murmurs. Carried by his detached delivery, the songs mirror the feeling of spacing out on the couch after a particularly rough day, the grim details of what you went through floating numbly in the periphery of your awareness, always just out of reach.
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