Out of the city that Frank Zappa came from is another musical act that defies convention. Baltimore’s Horse Lords is a quartet broadly considered to be experimental rock, but even that description might be too limiting. Andrew Bernstein (saxophone/percussion), Max Eilbacher (bass/electronics), Owen Gardner (guitar), and Sam Haberman (drums) make instrumentals that are largely unlike anything you’ve heard before but through clever and deliberate planning, make wildly disparate songs that draw you in all the same.
The Common Task is their fourth album in the last eight years, and they bring a whole career’s worth of ingenuity to it. Underlying all their spiffy stylistic gymnastics and creative arrangements are one or two note repetitions or short ostinatos that create hypnotic effects. Horse Lords goes genre-hopping like college kids go bar-hopping, drinking in cultures from all over the world, often creating novel cocktails of styles that are — wait for it — intoxicating.
In the case of “Fanfare For Effective Freedom” they literally do stagger at a 5/8 pulse, the percussion alongside and the riffs adding a North African flavor and skittish rock that always threatens to careen off course but never does, like a Captain Beefheart song. The minimalism used that song is taken a step further for “Against Gravity”, its insistent, one-note pattern mutating in fascinating ways and at one point suggesting an Irish jig. Then they move across the Irish Sea to Scotland with the discreetly technologically-assisted bagpipes of “The Radiant City.”
“People’s Park” (video above) moves the show to the Caribbean, the cradle of reggaeton. The rhythm is a carefully put-together development, incorporating by organic and electronic elements that seem to reach back before reggaeton to reggae and dub. “Integral Accident” is for the first half the most barren track of the bunch and also the longest. Once it gains cruising speed, there is a state of congruence between guitar, sax and wordless voice over a lively gait, building up toward an ever-ascending note resembling the lift-off of a spaceship.
The Common Task is now on sale, from Northern Spy.
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