Warhorses

It starts in the darkness…

It starts in a basement, dimly lit and not structurally sound, but accommodating enough, certainly, for the first two members of Warhorses to glimpse a deeper, complex truth, or a darker truth that dares to be excavated. You hear the word "dark" and you think of something specific; something simple, but Warhorses aren't anything specific and they've never been tempted to seek something simple when it comes to their creative process. This Detroit-based quartet have been navigating the often overlooked nuances of that aforementioned darkness for more than 10 years, and they've sonically divulged the results of that deep dive on their upcoming 2nd full length album, Shadow Gold.

Singer/Guitarist Mike Alexander and drummer Kristin Lyn started jamming in a Pontiac basement 14years ago, and even at that early stage, it occurred to them that they had tapped into something: ... that it would require another kind of endurance not typically perceived as necessary when one just joins a new band. This wasn't going to be casual, per se. That's why they soon enlisted guitar wizard Eric "EZ" Myers (initially on bass); Eric, at that point in 2008, was only dating (by long distance) his soon-to-be wife Kristin, but also had a friendship with Mike dating back to their teenage days. For Eric, he was worn down by his experiences in New York where a musician's life was all about the hustle, the machine, the rush to package something sellable; he wanted more of a mural-sized canvas, he wanted to be able to zero in on the minute details, he wanted something that would last. Thus, Warhorses was the perfect name for this in-it-for-the-long-haul cadre of musical adventurers.

Mike recalls the uber-atmospheric cinematic masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey playing in the background during one of their earliest rehearsals, and fittingly, the band's songs have, in a similar sense, been on a trajectory toward the amorphous beyond. Their first album, Flap Your Useless Wings would integrate elements of metal, shoegaze, psychedelia and drone, channeling and essentially exorcising various forms of darkness, it was catharsis by-way-of a heavy-rock--heavy not only in timbre, tempo and dynamics, but also heavy in the contemplative subjects (and often subconscious ephemera) addressed in Mike’s lyrics. 

Even before bassist Nathan Miller joined the band, about five years ago, their songs could storm past the five-minute mark, or even longer, but that's actually often the whittled down results of exceedingly more expansive sound assemblages. The unique way in which the four-piece craft their songs is often through a means of sculpting down from exploratory waves of various phrases and gnarly melodies, with loop pedals and drapes of distortion, and then sifting through these musical lucid-dreams caught on tape into  five-minutes of comparably condensed intensity from the original 20-minute slabs. 

When Nathan came on board, he steadily learned the bass parts to their back catalog and began adding his own rhythmic style. At that point, Warhorses had released another EP to follow Wings and had just put out the entrancing, distortion-draped 7" vinyl single "Burning Desire." From that point onward, though, they've been able to access something they’ve always been inspired to pursue, a unique kind of trance-like state of creation and performance. And that’s the name of the game: a state of entrancement. Your perceptions of metal or punk or shoegaze or psychedelic-rock or any other niche strain of guitar-bass-drum music, might carry with it limiting boundaries, and that’s what categories do--they constrict. 

But all this time, through their meditative creation-process, from their first album, to the next EP, up into Shadow Gold, with the way they almost detach from all the trivial turbulence of the day-to-day and access a different frequency as four unified minds, four unified souls, it demonstrates how the darkness can’t be separate from the light in a binary sense; Warhorses are exploring every field, and playing songs into the whole expanse of the human existence. If that quality of their music startles you but pulls you in at the same time, then that means you’re just tuned into that same frequency. It might start in the darkness and even return to it, but it doesn’t stay there. Redefine what’s dark to you, and mine your way toward some Shadow Gold.