AEM074 Horse’s Mouth

Insert­ing moments of musi­cal unrest into pop music with­out dis­turb­ing the grace­ful flow that makes pop songs so plea­sur­able is an incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult task. Even brief moments of dis­so­nance can be dis­tract­ing (occa­sion­ally one gets the feel­ing that they are inten­tional dis­trac­tions from poor song­writ­ing) or come off as forced, an insin­cere attempt to make a band sound more inter­est­ing or dif­fi­cult than they really are.  It requires a remark­ably gen­tle touch to make dis­so­nances and rhyth­mic quirks not only slip by with­out dis­rupt­ing the song, but actu­ally lock in and sound as if they are essen­tial and nat­ural, and this is, in fact, just the thing Tavo Car­bone of Brooklyn’s Horse’s Mouth excels at.

Carbone’s songs are short and rest­less, full of small idio­syn­crasies and twitches (beats added or miss­ing, lush vocal har­monies appear­ing and dis­ap­pear­ing just as fast, tem­pos that lurch and accel­er­ate).  You may feel like you’ve had your fill of idio­syn­cratic Brook­lyn rock bands (lord knows I get that feel­ing some­times), but the mem­bers of Horse’s Mouth are prob­a­bly not quite what you are pic­tur­ing after that descrip­tion.  There is noth­ing irri­tat­ingly or safely cool about them.  Horse’s Mouth is actu­ally refresh­ingly and gen­uinely nerdy.  In live videos, they are mostly clad in white t-shirts and jeans and Car­bone him­self sports an unas­sum­ing Monkees-style bowl cut, open­ing his mouth car­toon­ishly wide and bow­ing his head to hit the low­est notes.  After all, the band draws as much influ­ence from show­tunes (bear with me) and clas­si­cal music as they do from the sta­ples of indie pop.  Their Ampeater B-side “Thin Branches Against a Win­dow” actu­ally ends with a loop from a familiar-sounding orches­tral piece.

A Brook­lyn native, Car­bone met his band­mates, drum­mer J.J. Beck, bassist Matt Scott, vio­lin­ist Heather Som­mer­lad, and multi-instrumentalist Michael Chin­worth, at Ben­ning­ton Col­lege, a school in Ver­mont that has pro­duced other Ampeater favorites like Trevor Wil­son (AEM022) and Will Strat­ton (AEM70).  Car­bone actu­ally has quite a lot in com­mon with Wil­son, from his tightly coiled vibrato and the­atri­cal deliv­ery to his com­po­si­tional and con­cep­tual ambi­tion.  The mem­bers of Horse’s Mouth have been play­ing Carbone’s songs together in var­i­ous forms and with var­i­ous other musi­cians since 2005 (includ­ing, at one point, a 17 piece orches­tra), though Horse’s Mouth as a band only offi­cially dates back to 2008.  You can hear the chem­istry between the musi­cians almost imme­di­ately upon lis­ten­ing, and espe­cially on watch­ing some of the live footage shot by Con­nor Kam­merer and Pix­el­horse. The live per­for­mances are impres­sively faith­ful to the record with­out los­ing any of the feel­ing of fun and spon­tane­ity that comes from the itchy arrangements.

A-side “In the Woods” (both songs in today’s sin­gle are drawn from the band’s new album Sophia, which will be released later this month in CD and DVD form, the lat­ter fea­tur­ing orig­i­nal films made by 12 video­g­ra­phers, one for each song) opens with a sprightly pick­ing fig­ure on the elec­tric and a drum­beat that matches the guitar’s rhyth­mic accents pre­cisely.  The verses each close with a lovely, har­mo­nized “not old enough to know”, on the last word of which the vocals begin in a tense minor 7^th before leap­ing up to catch and hang on a high falsetto har­mony.  It’s one of those effort­less lit­tle moments of dis­so­nance that pro­vide the ten­sion and release in Carbone’s songs, rather than the usual grad­ual emo­tional crescendo thing, which is okay too, only sig­nif­i­cantly more expected.  Also notice the way the lovely spi­ral­ing vio­lin fig­ure that leads us into the instru­men­tal verse is cast into bold by the drums brief dis­ap­pear­ance, and the way the drums are called back by a hand­clap (the only one in the entire song).  The most unex­pected moment of unease comes dur­ing the very last descend­ing “know”, where instead of resolv­ing to the root, Carbone’s vocal melody rolls down through per­fect con­so­nance before land­ing on the flat two, a half step up from the one of the final chord.  It’s prob­a­bly the most dis­so­nant note you can sing over a minor chord, and it has an intensely dis­qui­et­ing effect as the last note of the whole song, espe­cially the way Car­bone coats it with pretty vibrato, as if it’s the most beau­ti­ful note in the world.  Yet this is actu­ally the very thing that sells it on the record­ing: it doesn’t sound like it’s an ugly note to him.  It sounds like the note that he wanted the song to end on.  On the album (which drops on March 20^th and which I haven’t heard in its entirety), each song is strung into the next, so per­haps this final ten­sion is a way of mov­ing into the next song.

B-side “Thin Branches Against a Win­dow,” after a brief organ intro, again matches the rhyth­mic emphases of the gui­tar to the drum part, giv­ing the song a lilt­ing, dancy feel that uni­fies it with “In the Woods” some­what, though this song is much more of an exer­cise in con­stant motion.  Before the first verse even starts, it careens off into a very brief sort of Deer­hoof inter­lude, which pock­marks the song peri­od­i­cally, in which the tempo abruptly and com­pletely changes and the drums play a cou­ple of quick, skit­ter­ing fills.  The song rarely stays in any one meter for more than a few bars, stick­ing mostly, but not entirely, to 4/4 dur­ing the verses and oth­er­wise jump­ing around like a mad­man, a feel­ing that is coun­tered only by the calm and stately vio­lin parts.  After the one moment where every­thing coheres into what sounds as if it’s going to be an actual cho­rus (repeat­ing melody and lyric, 4/4 time, descend­ing har­mony), the meter changes and the vio­lin and gui­tar spin out of con­trol, every­thing clash­ing and then some­how resolv­ing into what sounds like a loop from a Schu­bert record, which finally plays itself out into three acoustic gui­tar arpeg­gios and…the sound of a bird chirp­ing?  It’s an unbe­liev­able amount of stuff crammed into less than three min­utes, and when faced with it it’s easy to over­look the love­li­ness of the chim­ing gui­tars and glock­en­spiels that under­score the verses.

I’ve men­tioned before how music that main­tains its mys­tery is often far more effec­tive, and Car­bone does exactly that here, giv­ing us lyrics oblique enough to mean a great many things and music that skates through so many moods and meters and feels that it’s hard to say just what exactly makes it feel coher­ent, though cer­tainly some­thing does.  Per­haps it’s the com­mon sounds of each member’s voice (they all sing, exclud­ing Beck, the drum­mer), or the dis­tinctly per­sonal style each has on his or her instru­ment.  Per­haps it’s that all Horse’s Mouth songs feel odd in pre­cisely the same way, the prod­uct of Carbone’s unique and uni­fied vision, impos­si­ble to pin down com­pletely but evoca­tive and plea­sur­ably strange, like a fairy­tale land­scape (not one of the neutered ones where every­one is nice and bor­ing, but the Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen kind, where lit­tle girls get their feet cut off with axes).

Gabe Birn­baum

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