Chiaroscuro – I Break Horses
Some of rock music’s greatest energy and most violent impulses toward creation exist, as on Earth, at the margins. The fraught borders between guitar and laptop; between stage and club; between recording studio and bedroom: all have shown up, celebrated, in albums by brand new artists (or brand new albums by old artists, in the case of, say, Radiohead) over the past fifteen years.
Three years ago it was the awkwardly named I Break Horses who materialized out of the void and astride the abyss. The music of their debut album Hearts was frequently technical and highly electronic, but it owed nearly all of its relevance, and excellence, to a rock band’s unending and instinctive search for anthem and melody. It was an album of hooks—and the synthetic gossamer flourishes served as potent highlights. Like those weirdo tubular things growing around deep sea vents, I Break Horses were harnessing an energy, and producing a form, that was new to science.
The biochemistry may have been too challenging to pull off a second time around. Encore album Chiaroscuro still manages to be pretty, but compared to Hearts there seems to be quite a bit less, um, heart. Less blood flowing, less warmth. Part of this was surely intentional: there seem to be significantly fewer guitars and actual drums this time around, and even the album artwork has lurched dramatically toward the synthetic.
The shift is not approached with subtlety. Album opener “You Burn” opens with a pulsing beat that could have been intercepted from space. Warmth, such as it is, appears only to the extent that it can be absorbed from a sparingly played piano—which is to say, it doesn’t. There are blips and bleeps, and synthetic drums, and there is a preponderance of dread. Hearts made its, um, bones thanks to an unshakeable tendency toward elevation; its melodies were almost universally ascendant. But for all of the otherworldliness on display throughout “You Burn,” there is no uplift. Just a scary, controlled descent.
The album isn’t all slow, steady and calculated. Follow up track “Faith” brings in hectic, scattershot percussion before piling on layers of vocal and keyboard. This ends up working well by the last minute of the track, with the happenstance beat falling under the spell of a higher melody, but again it all sounds like the work of some other, lesser band.
And then, eventually, we arrive at the album’s winning highlight: fourth track “Denial.” After twenty seconds of what sounds like the world’s most annoying video game sound effects, the song’s melody and vocal take flight—and interestingly they seem to gesture very little, if at all, in the direction of the successes of Hearts. It is difficult to locate the sound of a physical, non-electronic instrument here, but at least the “old” I Break Horses penchant for melodic superstructure finally seems to be winning the programming battle.
Lyrics are not exactly front and center here—not in “Denial” and not elsewhere on Chiaroscuro. Beyond the regular refrain “fade out” on this track, the words basically tend to do just that. The sound-first, lyrics-later approach is consistent between albums, but because the songs have grown so elaborately synthetic, the effect this time around is more noticeably isolating. And worse. One simply cannot listen to the entirety of the latest album without thinking about—or worse, experiencing—a drowning.
Beyond “Denial” the album tilts sharply inward toward the center of the circuit board. “Berceuse” skitters and throbs in the manner of a lost trip-hop track; “Medicine Brush” expands ever outward in an Airborne Toxic Event of electronic effects and goes two minutes-plus before anything resembling a melody takes shape. It is somewhere around here, in fact, that lead singer Maria Lindén actually begins to sound wheezy—as opposed to breathy or sultry. Indeed, by this point the entire Good Ship Chiaroscuro seems to have run out of air—the song eventually reaches seven minutes in length and manages to sound a bit longer than that.
The band earn credits for managing to keep the album whole, however. For all of its sprawl, and darkness, and dyspnea, Chiaroscuro does not ever suffer from an uneven construction. There is depth of both focus and intent to these songs—even if the goal seems to have eventually become something closer to unpleasant or disturbing than beautiful. As such, it may be a bit of an error to apply the lessons of Hearts to this follow up album. Maybe the band doesn’t owe us transcendent beauty and uplift every time into the studio. But there are enough blushes of the spectacular on the first half of Chiaroscuro to suggest that the finished project fell a bit short of what it could have been.
And for the love of it: whence the guitars and drums? Listeners and visitors should steal a few minutes to find and enjoy “Empty Bottles” from Hearts. The languid, dreamy vocals will immediately trigger the smile of the familiar. And the cupboard of synthetic sound effect tricks was back then also well-stocked. But the first and sustaining sound of “Empty Bottles” is the strum of a guitar. It is a backbone, or a runway worthy of takeoff. And very suddenly, this song is alight. What’s more, it wraps up in just over three minutes.
In contrast, the largely guitar-free Chiaroscuro begins taking on water somewhere around track 6, and the listener is not long for the world. Or too long, if one adds up the minutes of some of these latter tracks.
We are drowning. By final track “Heart to Know” (a bit of cruel irony in recalling the title of the debut album) the tempo and sound have grown overtly funereal. The listener is sinking, or falling, or being buried. How did we start at the glittering larger-than-life, and too-big-for-any-genre, warmth of the band's inception, and get to here? What happened to them?
I Break Horses, please, come back to the light.
Keepers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9.
February 2014
