Full Album Stream: Horseback: Half Blood – new album

HORSEBACK's first true new release for Relapse Records, ‘Half Blood’, is out now, May 8th, 2012, and should be bought here (Relapse) immediately. This “amalgamation of drone, doom, black-metal, psychedelia, post-rock, noise, and ambience” was recorded by the band's mastermind Jenks Miller at The Chateau with a wide array of instruments including guitar, bass, drums, keys, piano, bells, contact mics, field recordings, drum programming, noise and various signal processors, and comes available as CD, LP and as digital download. The album's stunning artwork was created by Russian surrealist painter Denis Forkas Kostromitin. Listen to the full album here (BandCamp) or via player available below:

 

HORSEBACK: Half Blood

 

“With ‘Half Blood’, HORSEBACK's mastermind Jenks Miller has brilliantly managed to throw all of those styles into one seamless album. ‘Half Blood’ naturally shifts from Americana twang to fiercely evil buzzing guitars to hypnotically meditative kraut-drone with a level of confidence that takes other bands years to master. HORSEBACK's ‘Half Blood’ is NEUROSIS on a Neil Young overdose, EARTH after being locked in a room with Merzbow (Japanese noise musician) for weeks straight. This is an album at once immediately captivating as well as rewarding for those who treasure music that reveals new twists and turns with repeated listens,” [impresses the press release and provides proof; listen to two brand new HORSEBACK's tunes below:]

“HORSEBACK have been plying this oddball-but-effective hybrid for a couple of years now,” [wrote Jess Harvell for Pitchfork] “ ‘Half Blood’ is simply the strongest argument yet for just how effective it can be. They’re still probably the only band in the world that makes a writer want to reference both weirder-than-weird black-metal band NECROFROST (those Tolkein orc vocals) and the lonesome cowboy epics of CALEXICO (those mournful guitars and weighted-by-heartbreak drums). Earlier albums, like 2010's ‘The Invisible Mountain’, proved their point with gusto, namely that a band could evoke the sad, wide-open spaces of American roots music while suggesting the screams and riffs of black metal could be equally (and not dissimilarly) affecting. Drunken ballads about losing everything aren’t a million miles from drinking blood and wailing about how you wish everything would just stop already.” [Read the rest of this well-written review here (Pitchfork).]

 

HORSEBACK is one of Jenks Miller's many projects; he resides in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he records music (under his own name and as HORSEBACK), and plays guitar in the Americana band MOUNT MORIAH. (He has also played on, produced, recorded and/or mixed a number of records for other bands.) Relapse Records have reissued HORSEBACK's efforts that had previously appeared on smaller labels; ‘The Invisible Mountain’ was rereleased in 2010 and can be listened to in its entirety below and bought through here (BandCamp),

 

HORSEBACK: The Invisible Mountain

 

and a double album release, ‘The Gorgon Tongue (Impale Golden Horn/Forbidden Planet)’, in 2011, thus “providing further exposure to Jenks Miller's excellent work in varying realms of loud guitar dronescapes”, as put by Ned Raggett, AllMusic. Listen to the full recording below and buy it through here (BandCamp):

 

HORSEBACK: The Gorgon Tongue (Impale Golden Horn/Forbidden Planet)

 

HORSEBACK features: Jenks Miller, and sometimes includes John Crouch, Nick Petersen, Nora Rogers, Rich James, Bradley Cook, Jon Mackey, and others