Another stellar offering from a band with a burgeoning reputation.
Norfolk’s Brown Horse is a band that is nothing if not prolific. Total Dive is the band’s third album in as many years. That productivity probably shouldn’t be a surprise, coming as it does on the back of stellar reviews, the not-insignificant kudos of supporting Courtney Marie Andrews on her recent tour, and the likes of Radcliffe and Maconie giving the band airtime on Radio 6. The band are clearly riding the wave at the moment, and the new album isn’t going to bring them crashing down to earth anytime soon.
If, for those dates with Andrews, the band adopted a more pared-back approach, that could be conceived as a clever approach to take with that audience. By contrast, Total Dive is unashamedly loud and brash. It is the sound of a band high on confidence and clear in its direction of travel. Opening track, Sorrow Reigns, sets the tone. The video was revealed on these pages a few weeks ago, and the description of the track “searing guitars…chunky riffs…the twin powers of electric guitar and fuzzy lap steel” tells you everything about the album as a whole. It is a stunner of an album opener and reveals much about what Brown Horse is all about.
Those twin guitars of Nyle Holihan and Emma Tovell are ever-present even when the songs adopt a more restrained approach. Wreck is a six-minute-long statement of intent that manages to somehow adopt the feel of a more nuanced and subtle song without losing the desire to set the track to max volume to savour the thrill of those guitars working at full pelt. It is a six-minute song that contrives to leave the listener with the feeling that they have been cheated somehow, the denouement coming along much too soon.
Rowan Braham’s organ work sits bubbling under the surface throughout, but is given full rein on Heavy, a track that starts relatively quietly, then builds to a big, noisy climax. The guitar riffs are more subtle here, and initially at least, more restrained, but they are no less distinctive for that. Contrast that with Total Dive, where the riff gets the track in motion from the start and is more than worthy of that title track moniker.
Brown Horse is a band on the up, and Total Dive does nothing to disabuse us of that notion. An imminent UK tour is followed swiftly by a first-ever North American tour, and if listening to the album doesn’t compel you to search out those dates with the certainty that here is a band that demands to be seen live, then nothing will.
