Horseback, The Invisible Mountain: Godspeed You! Black Metal
With their issue of Horseback’s The Invisible Mountain full-length, Relapse gets a shot at exposing a vital and relative newcomer to a wider audience. First released through Utech Records last year, The Invisible Mountain is a stylistic amalgamation pulled off with striking poise by Horseback, the band moniker taken on by Chapel Hill, North Carolina, artist Jenks Miller, who combines ambient drone and the occasional bout of stoner riffing with harsh black metal vocals. The Invisible Mountain is Horseback’s second full-length (Miller also releases material under his own name), and with four tracks all over six minutes long, it’s an album that takes its time unfolding but has a sense of immediacy nonetheless.
In many ways, it’s saved by the mix. Were Miller’s vocals not relatively buried and were the ambient guitar layers not brought to the fore, The Invisible Mountain would be completely intolerable. As it is, fans of Grails and post-metal types will find plenty to latch onto with Horseback. I wouldn’t go as far as to call the music experimental, because Miller isn’t really doing anything that hasn’t been done in any of the styles he’s toying with and melding, but on a conceptual level, Horseback could be breaking new ground. Opener “Invokation” doesn’t seem to be anything special, just a doomy riffer with some thick bottom end and rolling drums, but when Miller comes in with the vocals, it gets obvious real quick that Horseback isn’t just another post-doom outfit. Think darker Wino guitars with Attila Csihar singing over them and you’ll have some idea of where “Invokation” is going.
“Tyrant Symmetry” meshes late Earth-style droning jazzy guitar lines with a rumbling bass, steady cymbal crashes and more blackened growling. The balance of metal and non-metal influences makes Horseback an interesting proposition, and I can see why Relapse would want a piece of The Invisible Mountain. It’s an album that few are really going to take to, but I can see where someone in their office could be really passionate about it too, the way the album turns with its title track, gets more active, seeming more straightforward while also going further into its own head, bouncing a quarter off Neurosis’ “Stones from the Sky” (as all post-metal must) without ever actually sounding like it. It seems to take the black metal influence everyone purports to have these days and actually make it a reality, without sounding silly or too over the top in the process. Thinking man’s black metal? Maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a Horseback record show up on Hydra Head at some point.
The Invisible Mountain, soon to be followed up by Forbidden Planet on Aurora Borealis and a host of split releases before the end of the year, makes its final stand with the 16-plus minute “Hatecloud Dissolving into Nothing,” on which Miller evokes a melodious drone and gradually accompanies it with acoustic guitar. Vocally, the track represents the biggest challenge of the album, in that you wonder listening how the hell he’s going to cackle over this, but Miller subverts the issue by cackling under it, the vocals so low in the mix you forget they’re there if you’re not paying specific attention. Well played. The song maintains a peaceful and subdued feel throughout (I can’t even begin to tell you how glad I was when blastbeats never showed up), at last dissolving as per its title into a slow fade into silence. As I said, The Invisible Mountain is going to hit a nerve with a select few, but for those who regard “experimental” as a genre of choice, or anyone sick of sameyness in either their doom, ambient of black metals, Horseback has no shortage of individuality to share, and for an act that’s only existed in terms of output for three years, Miller’s is remarkably adept at doing without overdoing it. A lesson in subtlety for the screaming hordes.
Tags: Chapel Hill, Horseback, North Carolina, Relapse
