HORSEY

I suppose it's technically a compilation since some of the tracks were on a prior release, but it seems sort of strange that it's listed as such here anyway. So be it.

Starting off with a particularly strange cover of a classic acid folk song that wasn't exactly Sarah Plain and Tall to begin with, Comus' "Diana," Horsey right away appealed to me as a big fan of the aforementioned. Diana doesn't necessarily set the tone for the album, however, as the later tracks are perhaps less dirge and more folk. Although the first half of this album (originally from the split with Sol Invictus and Nurse With Wound entitled Horse/Lex Talionis/Lumb's Sister) is pretty engaging, well performed and whatnot, I find the second half even more to my tastes. Epic meandering and droning folkesque. Vocals sometimes spoken, sometimes chanted, but more often gently sang. The drums, when they show up, are pounding in a sort of galloping manner that I guess is fitting because that's what horses do. The bass is pretty loud and sort of reminds me of Swans. The background keys are slightly out of tune in a haunting and beautiful manner. Overall, an album very based on aesthetics. That's something that appeals largely to me, but maybe not to you.

I feel like this album is basically worth buying just for the album art, but the music is nice too.

Horsey is an expanded edition of Horse, which was originally issued as part of a three-disc set in 1990 with Lex Talionis by Sol Invictus and Lumbs Sister by Nurse With Wound. Unlike in some cases, where David Tibet's addition of extra tracks to an album doesn't offer much, here the two additions (the two parts of Broken Birds Fly) actually fit in nicely, since they were recorded in the same jams between David Tibet and Japanese session musicians that yielded the title track.

The first side of the album consists of a number of pieces recorded with a lineup broadly similar to that responsible for the Swastikas for Noddy/Crooked Crosses for the Nodding God era, and are decent pieces in that general vein. (Notably, there's a near-unrecognisable cover of Diana by Comus). The second side consists of the aforementioned Japanese jams. The first side tracks and the parts of Broken Birds Fly are decent enough, but the real highlight of this album - a five star track in three-and-a-half star surroundings - is the epic Horsey, in which David Tibet begins talking about some (hopefully fictional) character's alarming heroin consumption ("horse", geddit?) and then runs wild with the horse = heroin motif, working in his ideas about spirituality to depict a life and mind in freefall under the influence of a drug habit that they can no longer control.

Like the titular horse, it begins at a deliberate, plodding pace... then it trots... then it launches into a full gallop, the backing closer to flat- out psychedelic rock than anything on a Current 93 album preceding these sessions. Finally, the tune collapses into chaos, a powerful musical evocation of the horse's legs crumpling underneath it as the hapless rider is thrown into oblivion. It is a true masterpiece, and one of the best things David Tibet has ever done.