HORSE LORDS - Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive!

Experimental and unconventional, straddling both kraut-rock and math-rock, and champions of a minimalism that goes hand in hand with microtonal music, Horse Lords are one of the most creative forces on the contemporary scene.
The Baltimore quartet, now based in Berlin, manage to win over both King Crimson fans and avant-jazz-rock enthusiasts, carrying on their skillful reinvention of sonic templates drawn from Steve Reich/Philip Glass, kraut-rock rhythmic geometries, mutant-funk grooves, and post-rock-flavored provocations.

The new album, “Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive!”, confirms their fragmentary, repetitive style — dense and exasperating, yet intelligently dynamic and unpredictable. The art of sonic collage in kaleidoscopic form remains the band's most effective weapon. That's evident in the irresistible rhythmic whirlwind of “Before The Law”, as well as in the splendid “After The Last Sky”. In this last track, a looping finger-picking figure merges with guitar distortion, screaming horns and restless electronic textures worthy of Aphex Twin, raising the emotional tension and confirming the band's excellent handling of any contaminations.
The band's physical abstraction feels less startling today than it did at the outset, especially after Angine de Poitrine made certain microtonal deconstructions or the heavy use of odd time signatures and polyrhythms more familiar. With “Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive!”, though, Horse Lords play the accessibility card. The playful use of synths and vocoder-filtered vocals on “First Galactic Utopia” and “Second Galactic Utopia”, together with the decidedly unorthodox “A City Yet To Come”, worms its way into your mind and upends the usual standards of pleasantness. Suddenly, the conventional melodicism that reigns elsewhere in music — even in avant-garde circles — comes across as irritating, insipid, and akin to noise as mass distraction.
By contrast, the noise made by Horse Lords is pure expressive art.

All this creative skill is magically distilled in the decision to entrust the interludes to a phrase lifted from American sacred music, “We seek a city yet to come”, repeated endlessly throughout the album (“Eureka 378-B”, and the three parts of “Rotation”). This device, combined with the essential minimalist fresco of the title track, opens up a potential gateway to a sonic and spiritual transcendence that remains unique and distinctive on the contemporary scene.

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25/07/2026