Horse Jumper for Love

The curiously named Horse Jumper for Love return with new album, their fifth, ‘Disaster Trick’ out on Run for Cover Records.

The Boston ‘slowcore’ trio, frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos with bassist John Margaris and drummer James Doran, are aided and abetted by Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman and MJ Lenderman as well as Squirrel Flower’s Ella Williams.

The album is a work of post-grunge lo-fi-ing songcraft that signals - for Giannopoulos in particular - a necessary life-pattern rearranging and reordering that sonically recalls Neil Young at his most spare and beat-up-shoe-gazing and perhaps incongruously Scottish duo Arab Strap’s lyrical-folk tales from the dark side of life with hope always bleakly visible in the distance.

Giannopoulos delivers an endless stream of unconscious (in the incapacitated sense) mutterances, mumbled, tumbled messages or missives that suddenly trail off.

Like a bar-stool preacher, forever happy in the haze of every drunken hour, the effect is one of a clasping, grasping hold on reality and a stark realisation that to booze to excess is to lose to recess, to concede defeat to dark desire and detriment. Once you loosen your throttle on the bottle the newfound clarity startles.

At its core lies a story of sobriety being substituted by a secular form of piety, cathartic redemption through artistic creation. The slow-paced, downbeat nature is akin to a hangover, the haunting, harrowing feeling of self-loathing and remorse. Pour me, pour me, poor me … have another think.

Song titles such as ‘Curtain’, ‘Death Spiral’ and ‘Gates of Heaven’ tell stories by themselves. The latter song along with the closing ‘Nude Descending’ suggests emancipation and the vital signs that the worst may yet be over.

The almost catatonic ‘Word’ is a dragged out, drawled up, dredged from the gut apologia.

Overall, ‘Disaster Trick’ is a clearing of the psychic decks, a resetting of the spiritual clock and a manifesto for renewal.