Horseback

The Gorgon Tongue: Impale Golden Horn + Forbidden Planet (Reissue)

Written by: PP on 17/07/2011 00:56:04

The latest Horseback album "The Invisible Mountain" was a decent atmospheric drone / avant-garde metal album instrumentally, but suffered from simply awful vocals that reduced their expression into a noisy mess. So I didn't expect much better from the previous records "Impale Golden Horn" and "Forbidden Planet" which are being reissued as "The Gorgon Tongue". Now, information on this is scarce, so I'm not sure if these are actually credited as original Horseback albums, especially when you'd wouldn't believe it to be the same band playing on "The Invisible Mountain" and the first part of this re-issue. Because where the former was a droning metal album, the latter has more in common with ambient post-rock and drawn out bright feedback than anything else. It can be decent, but listening to a 17 minute song ("Finale") which basically repeats the same prolonged progression from start to finish feels a little...pointless.

The second half, "Forbidden Planet", is the metallic part of this release. The awful, awful gurgled and indecipherable shrieks that sound like demonic screeching don't make an expression that's essentially endless loops of noisy distortion any better. In fact I'll have to admit Horseback being one of the rare instances of music where I just don't get it. The tracks are so repetitive and barely any different from each other, so when you go through 36 minutes of the same shit (or alternatively 49 minutes on the first part of the re-issue), you can't but help imagine that a live show with Horseback must be one of the most boring experiences you can possibly have in a live environment. For me, the entire musical concept behind Horseback is on the wrong side of the border of what should be considered as music, no matter how 'experimental' or 'avant-garde' you might claim it to be.

4

Download: Blood Fountain
For the fans of: experimental drone/post-rock combo
Listen: Myspace

Release date 10.05.2011
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