Think of the patience it requires to play in Horse Lords. You’ve trained your fingers and ears to the surgical fine point wherein you can play your instrument, cleanly and unerringly, against two or three conflicting meters. And then you bring this talent to bear on a piece like “Playing and Reality,” from their latest full-length, Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!, which asks you to play the same four notes, in the same order, in lockstep. Over and over and over again.
Instrumental rock music of the kind Horse Lords make—hypnotic, hyper-focused, complex—usually carries a whiff of manifesto, offering a map toward transcendence of some political, metaphysical, or pick-your-variety kind. No one is transcending in Horse Lords’ music, and that’s by design: This is grounded music of collective effort, the hum of worker drones—work horses?
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Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! makes one or two schematic tweaks to the chassis they’ve built, resulting in a smoother, more welcoming ride than usual. The core group now augments itself with the bass clarinetist Madison Greenstone, trombonist Weston Olencki, and, for the first time in the band’s history, vocals. On the opening track, Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor’s lightly processed harmonizing sounds, for about 58 seconds, like a hymn. With no lyric sheet, I caught what sounded like “we are not biting,” “we are seeking,” and (maybe) “we are home” before the melodic line breaks up, their phrasing hiccups, and they shred their voices into fragments.
Their bird-call voices cast an alluring glow over the music’s surface, infusing Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! with air and light. This is surely the gentlest and prettiest Horse Lords album, and maybe their first to conjure nature’s ceaseless motion instead of the kind found in city blocks. Guo and Saylor chant teasingly over the groove of “A City Yet to Come,” helping steady the piece’s troubled surface, and “After the Last Sky” is the first Horse Lords piece that might keep you company while lying on your back in a field. The little four-note melodic scraps tumble over each other ceaselessly in a call-and-response that scrambles your sense of which end is transmission and which is reception. All of those busy little cells, working away in seeming isolation, and then, suddenly: enormity.
I often reach for Horse Lords’ music during that portion of my day when my mind feels like a smoothly hurtling machine, because it’s such a reliable stimulant to hyper-focus. But I also sense a deeper energy beckoning at the music’s edges. On “Brain of the Firm,” the members are so locked into their individual parts that it’s not always easy to tell if the melodic line is coming from one guitar, two of them doubling each other, or some third melodic line that suggests itself, like an auditory hallucination, in the middle space, where all these notes pool and mix together. It’s in these trembling, potential-filled middle spaces into which the band members pour their energy, and listening to them can feel like staring into the trembling center of some globular alien light. This is where the space for “transcendence” opens in the music Horse Lords create: If it exists, it hovers well above their heads, a hum generated by their collective endeavor, and it serves something or someone completely other than themselves.
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