Horseback – Piedmont Apocrypha
Written by: Michael Snoxall
Horseback is one of those projects you can’t pin down; Jenks Miller’s abstract mind of compositional thinking transcends a regulated sound, and Horseback reflects the experimental qualities inherent in Miller. Line up a drone/ambient album like Impale Golden Horn alongside the electronic, noisy, (wonderful) mess of Stolen Fire and it’s difficult to say you’re listening to the same artist. After releasing a solo album and a record with Mount Moriah last year, it’s a blessing that Miller hasn’t reached any kind of creative cap, and it’s a sheer delight to hear where Horseback’s sound has headed with Piedmont Apocrypha.
Like all albums before it, Piedmont Apocrypha defies any expectation of sound based on the band’s previous outing. What fans are rewarded with on this album are vast soundscapes of textural beauty, psychedelia, warm country-toned drones and even some ritualistic sounding musical practice. ‘Passing Through’ opens the album up with melodic plucking of guitar strings, the sporadic sweeping of brushes on cymbals, the feedback and the ambience of the scene the music sets being torn down as it makes way for the country-blues grooves and developmental droning organ keys and guitar riffs. It’s a sound that builds slow but quickly and meticulously buries itself deep in the listener, and as it grooves through you, it sets the tone for the rest of the album—though that’s not to say the aural tone and output of the following tracks are anything like that of ‘Passing Through’, but the way it opens the listener up quickly to the warmth of the music makes it all the more euphoric as the title track seeps in with ten minutes of slow-changing drone-blues ambience. Harmonicas sound off almost silently, you hearsomething rattling, as if wind is blown from the power and physicality of the music gyrating through the speakers. It’s music that paints a picture, sets a tone, throws the listener into a landscape, and the serene, soulful and dusk-empathetic, sunshine-over-hills, country-soaked coalescence of sound and imagery is enough to make me want this track to go on forever.
And it’s perhaps in this desire for more that the album has both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness, since it’s such a difficult feat for an artist to create music that is not simply enjoyable, but desirable. Music that doesn’t leave you running out the clock, it doesn’t leave you thinking towards the end, “oh, hey, what will I listen to next?”—But music that, when it’s all over, you don’t know where the time went or how it happened, but the album’s over, and you find yourself listening to it again just to sate the need. ‘Passing Through’ opens up the album brightly and even jolly, ‘Piedmont Apocrypha’ sees the sun falling behind hills, and the third track, ‘Milk and Honey’, is the crickets chirping after dark and it brings forth the more magical, nuanced, fantastical sounds of darkness, earthiness, stars and shadows and being lost within trees. The opening for the ‘Milk and Honey’ sounds very much like what you’d expect from a modern Earth record, and the semblance is a welcome one. Though the track is over far too quickly for my liking, it seems to act like a doorway for the even more gritty and unearthed sounds of ‘Consecration Blues’. And as the sequence and progression of those four tracks and all the sounds and feelings and images they encompass, ‘Chanting Out the Low Shadow’ brings them full-circle in a seventeen-minute epic that brings Horseback’s metal qualities back for a shining roots-doom ceremony. Miller chants in his blackened rasp, and later his clean vocals are becoming of the music as the song builds and builds with bass-heavy tom drums, tremolo riffs and pure psychedelic noise.
Piedmont Apocrypha is a pilgrimage through settings of reality and the darkest corners of fantasy; in a short forty-minute runtime it encompasses so many things with a minimalistic style that runs deep. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that after many repeated listens, this album has become my favourite in Horseback’s flourishing discography. It’s expressive, it’s expansive and it’s just beautiful.