Review Summary: Lucidity distilled.
Interventions is a curious beast dug up by a team of equally curious Horse Lords, Lords wielding saxophones, custom refretted guitars, and all necessary manner of electronics. About halfway through the album's opener, it's evident that these Lords don't intend on creating a single sound without effectively defining it in the same instance.
Interventions is a work of art first and foremost, and along with that, there's a few other things you should know before closing your eyes and taking the dive. The songwriting here quite purposely tiptoes the line between composition and improvisation, but that's not to say it's ever cluttered or random, just that the bass and drums tend to get locked in a continuous groove, while the guitars and horns hypnotically dance around it, completely shifting atmospheres with every slight change in note. In result, the songs may appear minimally structured, but are quite the opposite sonically. Also, prepare for songs in wildly different settings and with wildly different starting points than their predecessors. Perhaps the album's choice cuts are the ones in full-band mode, but this shouldn't detract from other tracks' roles in defining the album's ethos, such as the loud and haunting only-horn interplay in "Encounter II/Intervention II," or the moving speech of just-guitar that is "Intervention III." One more disclaimer: these songs are not just spiraling themselves into oblivion. They're works in meditation; ways to hear the depth of every tiny vibration; a path to a place in the mind completely free of interventions.
Now, with that out of the way, why don't we ascend?
Interventions states its case beautifully with the closest thing this style will ever have to an anthem: "Truthers." The drums sputter into gear, then the rest of the band appears instantaneously, as if the madness was already happening and we just happened to walk in on it. Every presence is known, and no instrument overshadows another. The drumbeat sweeps across the kit in a sort of jazz-like fashion, but stays rigid and kick-heavy in a way not like jazz at all. The guitars are just spiraling around the same delicious little scale portions, blasted off each time by the repeating neck-long bass slides. But each one seems to find a slightly different note, or maybe just a slightly different bend, every few seconds or so, giving these inherently repetitive compositions an eternal life that you just cannot turn off. The pattern the saxophone weaves through all this is made up of sharp little bursts so sharp one might almost mistake it for another guitar at first. But soon it starts to scrape the guitars, creating the surreal math-jazz texture that will likely go on as the center pin in Horse Lords' legacy. The notes that make up the harmonies are always intriguingly off-kilter, while the actual execution is always absurdly
on.
"Truthers" is particularly soaring. I mentioned the bass "blasting off" the guitars, but really, the whole song sounds like some kind of rocket blast stretched out to reveal all its dancing inner firepower. It makes perfect sense for this song to introduce the pantheon of
Interventions, because what else lies behind such a specific endeavor as this besides the archetypal search for truth? (And a love to jam, of course). But once you're introduced, Horse Lords waste no time in drawing you further into their finely honed gallery of electricity. "Intervention I" is literally a step into another dimension, both next to our reality and its preceding songs. It's made completely of synth, and it's really more of a sonic experiment than a "song" per se, but that doesn't make it without emotional effect. It begins with one solid pulsing note, then another and another, before a robotic, dissonant loop fades in from the void, a sound like an underwater car alarm. It's all patterns for a while, before our Lords say fuck-it-all and shoot the whole thing up into one of the cutest, freest, and most hilariously satisfying barrages of bleep-and-bloop I've ever heard. It's art supremely, in that it's both a statement on technology (remember, it's the first "intervention"), and an otherworldly sonic excursion you won't soon forget.
Where's all this going, though? "Toward the Omega Point"? No, that song's just the half-way marker. It's also the album at its most psychedelic, and its most subtly beautiful. It takes the circling repetition of "Truthers" and puts it to an even stricter test. The beat is slower, and the guitar for over half the song plays off a simple three-note pattern. The song is a strong contender for the album's most revelatory moment, as its initial massive chunk of intense, eyes-closed psychedelia could've just stayed and ended there, but rather opts to let the guitars keep dancing, and they dance just long enough to find a blissful moment of haze that ends up perfect for leading into a spark of unprecedented mathiness. This song is its own extended Omega point; it builds a genuine trance, then decidedly tears it down with a devious smirk.
However, all this talk of "spiraling," "dancing," and "trances" cannot only be credited to the musicians. The album's production truly is the key that unlocks its magic, and predictably, it's the one thing these vastly differing adventures have in common. First off, it's really loud and really clear. And from there, not a speck of detail is sacrificed. Every instrument is constantly moving around the room of the song, in addition to their own ever-changing movements of notes. "Bending to the Lash," the album's penultimate bash, is pushed to jaw-dropping transcendence by this wizardry. The drums and the nigh-sludgy bass stand firm in the center, while the guitars fade in already off-kilter, one falling through the few-note melody just a second after the other. While they're doing this, they're also spread farther and farther apart, which in turn bumps the rhythm section up for a moment. Then the saxophones come in. A three-part harmony eventually forms, but you can still hear
everything. The pattern repeats every measure, but the notes get higher, and also more and more
defiant. Words? What are words? This song conveys as much of the human spirit as any of Dylan's lyrical overloads, and what makes it even more striking is that it does it less subjectively, the production always there to make sure the message isn't muddled.
If you take nothing else with you when
Interventions is through, remember this: only a few of these songs really "end." Rather, most of them are merely interrupted. "Truthers"' final act may be in a cool-down, but it's still cut short by the next song; the rest of the album is evidence that this mode Horse Lords are playing in allows for the most endless of grooves. The tracks only end when their points are effectively made, and wisely, the transitions to the next song always reinforce this. The ghastly, auditorium-filling terror of "Encounter II/Intervention II" gets ironically played off by "Time Slip," a song that reintroduces guitars, drums, and bass, but still feels tamer compared to the last song with how everything in it just kind of... seeps in. If I may be so bold, I'd like to propose the idea of all these songs essentially acting as moving art exhibits, in a way that a simple rock song or even a frantic free jazz number could never. They represent what their titles name, the thing being "intervened" in our reality. The finale comes after "Bending to the Lash," for even this song had to "end." But even if you - hell, even if Horse Lords - bend to the lash, the thing still... "Never Ended."
"Never Ended" is the shortest song, and it's mostly made of annoying human shouting and annoying human applause. This suggestion of applause
interrupting the beauty of the endless groove is furthered by the production on the claps, making them dry and stale as all hell. They sound more like "clacks" than "claps." You're glad when it's over, recalling the preceding songs fondly. But even if it's not such a pleasant piece on its own, it's still a very important piece of the art, as it literally points to the rest of the album, leaving the listener acutely aware of the album's acute, and still wordless, self-awareness.
Of course bands have dabbled in spaces like these before, but I have yet to hear an album filled with such alien jams as these taken to such a level of refinement and purpose. It takes itself too seriously to be written off as just tentative wackiness; it finds real stones and it actually uncovers them for you. It's rock to get lost in, it's jazz to pump fists to, and it's all the avant-garde of Dada without the eye-rolls. They are the Horse Lords, and these are the
Interventions. Why don't you stay a while?
