With a stated aim to emulate Lightning Bolt, the sound of "Here Come the Hurricane" falls somewhere between that and (at times) a kind of instrumental Big Black, with a healthy dose of shoegaze and space rock thrown in for good measure. It’s more linear and progressive than the most ‘sonic punk-jazz-spaz-out’ aspects of Lightning Bolt but comparable in the use of squelchy, dirty bass and drums. And nothing else. Just solid repetition, delay and looping of those two instruments, producing a sound so huge it belies the one-man-and-his-8-track-in-a-bedroom setup that spawned it.
Given it is just drums and bass, "Here Come the Hurricane" is unsurprisingly (and fantastically) as heavy as fuck, and from the first track "Hurricane", through the almost tribal drumming in "Megaton" to the industrially threatening "The Sabres of Paradise" (the most Lightning Bolt-like of the tracks, to my ears), the rhythm section throbs through distortion and feedback, each track building and seething throughout. That said, he makes a pretty good fist of making you think he’s got some guitar going on as well and "Cowpoke", in particular, has such a high-pitched melody running through it, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’d had some company in that bedroom. Surely you shouldn’t be able to get that kind of scribbly feedback out of a bass?
Team Horse is only one of three projects Geoff Topley (for Team Horse is just him – aka Foamboy and Cruz) has on the go and if I had any reservations at all, it would be wondering whether he’s just a massively talented musician who could play pretty much anything he wanted to and doesn’t much care about what he’s doing. However, given it sounds this good (and that I’m not particularly 4REAL), I really couldn’t give a shit. Bloody marvellous. More of this please, Mr Topley.
Released now by Team Horse
Posted by Aicha Boyd
