Album review: HORSE the Band – A Natural Death

A Natural Death is the third album (or fourth, or possibly second, depending how you count it) from metalcore experimentalists HORSE the Band, and I’m afraid it defies my attempts at a regular review. I hope the following will explain why.

So lets clear the easy stuff out of the way. HORSE the Band (with their tongues at least partly in cheek) coined the subgenre of “Nintendocore” for themselves, and as much as they shy away from it somewhat nowadays it’s still a usefully concise description of what they do – which is, in a nutshell, extreme metalcore with added 8-bit games console noises used as synthesizer patches.

A Natural Death is more accessible than previous works, though still a long way from mass-market appeal – but the USP of the Nintendo noises actually makes them intriguing to a range of listeners who might not usually go for music quite this heavy.

From the point of view of academic criticism, HORSE the Band perform a type of postmodernist blending of forms, deconstructing eighties pop culture and extreme metal and building their own hybrid edifice from the Lego-like component parts. Seen in this light, A Natural Death is exactly what its title suggests it is – a text that chronicles the inevitable fore-destined decay of established boundaries in cultural forms, a chimaeric reimagining of what music can (and cannot) be.

Right.

HORSE the Band themselves would probably be the first to call bullshit on any poststructuralist critique of their work, though – and why the hell not? Music is “of the moment” in a way that most other artforms are not, and is hence more resistant to colonisation by Theory. Not to mention the fact that taking A Natural Death apart distracts you from its original purpose – which was to make a loud fast crazy noise and have some fun at the same time.

The result is quite anomolous. A Natural Death blends torn-throat vocals, crushing guitars and crashing games consoles at high velocity, but the end product is surprisingly listenable. The shock value decreases as an exponential: the first time you hear HORSE the Band you can’t quite grasp what they’re doing; the second time you realise how many of the tunes have pop melodies and insistent radio hooks at their core; by the fifth time, they’ve become almost unremarkable – background noise.

One obvious (and hence inherently suspect) conclusion that you could draw from this is that people below a certain age who grew up in affluent Western countries have become psychologically programmed to accept the 8-bit bleeps and bloops that power HORSE the Band’s music as a kind of audio wallpaper. Perhaps hundreds of childhood hours playing Super Mario on the SNES have created a Pavlovian reaction to grungy low-Nyquist square waves that makes listening to A Natural Death a calming – maybe even nostalgic – experience.

Or maybe the songs just aren’t particularly memorable. HORSE the Band take a fairly abstract approach to their lyrical content (although less so now than before) and once you can actually make out what’s being said you still have the (potentially unsolvable) challenge of deciding what Nathan Winneke actually means by any of it. This guessing game is part of the charm of A Natural Death, with songs like “Face of Bear” presenting you with so many interpretive choices it’s hard to know where to start.

And there’s the thing – I know I should let go and stop treating A Natural Death as some devilish sonic Rubik’s Cube, taunting me with its apparent simplicity but thwarting my attempts at solution. I think I would enjoy the album much more that way, and I expect most listeners will do exactly that; I hope so, because it deserves attention to be paid to it.

I suspect, however, that HORSE the Band will be secretly delighted to know that they’ve made an album that is almost impossible to explain on any terms other than its own; baffling critics is probably an added bonus. In other words, I can’t tell you whether you’ll like A Natural Death or not, but I definitely think you should hear it.