Spectreview: Horse Jumper Of Love – So Divine

-DARK ORANGE-

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“I am not going anywhere
I am not going anywhere”

Slowcore, better than many other subsections of rock, addresses the peculiarity of depressive thought patterns, frustrating garbled signals that flop ungracefully out of the brain and trudge at a snail’s pace. The genre’s ancestry starts with bands like Low, Sparklehorse and Red House Painters, bands that thrived in alternative’s ultra-negative heyday. Just as history folds over itself in twenty-year increments, a rekindled interest in these bands ripples over many indie bands of the current decade. One such band, Boston’s Horse Jumper Of Love, has it all down save perhaps a certain lyrical elegance, though even that may be part of the total package, a way to express thoughts that aren’t worth expressing. Their newest LP, So Divine, isn’t a huge evolution of their sound, but the band feels more focused, or at least more fervent. “Airport” opens the record with a classically slowcore dirge that then breaks down in blessed overdrive, while “Volcano” smartly builds itself out of a constant, unchanging four-chord progression in service to Dmitri Giannopoulos’ quiet affirmations of living in stagnation. These are among some of the album’s strongest moments, when the band’s sweet deep purple melodies are paired with enlivening hard rock textures, like on the tessellated “Ur Real Life” and the anti-anti-intellectual burst of alt-country in “Nature”.

The band’s weakest moments here remain’s Giannopoulous’ lyrics, which aren’t pretentious so much as they feel purposefully obfuscated without enough of a logical edge for justification. Slowcore (or any music relating to brain processes) is its own form of psychedelic music, and psychedelic music is notoriously hard to write lyrics for, requiring an airtight internal logic that’s equal parts logos and pathos. Yet barring a few ham-fisted metaphors (it’s hard to believe the eponymous “Aliens” would care so much about an under-described narrator) and ultimately well-meaning turns of grammar (like the disorientingly mismatched tenses of “Ur Real Life’s” first verse), a lot of what Giannopoulos writes here is sound, especially when its paired with what he and the band are playing. This is exemplified in “Poison,” a stellar illustration of dream logic that’s both tender and gutting, his best lyrical work yet. Slowly but surely Horse Jumper of Love is getting closer and closer to completely conveying a distinct mood and mindset, but even on the surface So Divine is serene in its melancholy, and it’s a shining example of slow rock done right.

Recommended after an absolutely terrible day of work.