by Jack Meyer (@johnjackmeyer)
About halfway through Horse Jumper of Love’s new album, during the relatively up-tempo “Sitting on the Porch,” the Boston trio slips into the refrain, drums and guitars unified in a steady 3/4 build, all pointed toward a smoldering finish. That is until a few drawn out, dislocating guitar bends arrive in its place, breaking up not just the buildup, but the propulsive chug gluing the rest of the song together. Like the air getting sucked out of a balloon you were blowing up to burst, it’s satisfying in a way—just not the way you were expecting. These sorts of quasi anti-climaxes, littered across Horse Jumper’s third album, Natural Part, suggest a band negotiating brighter production and tighter songwriting with a more unpredictable and, at times, challenging sound.
Waste permeates the language of the album - trash covering room floors, skunks scavenging through garbage, half-eaten food, split ends of hair inside a plastic bag. An almost embarrassing accumulation of life seems to weigh the music down as frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos groans “Does it make sense, does it matter” under slowcore percussion and hazy scrapes of guitar. This conflict between the lightness of letting go and the hard-won significance of sitting with disorder till it has something meaningful to say lingers at the corners of many of the songs’ impressionistic sketches.
The band’s fragmented approach to lyrics can still feel unnecessarily obtuse at times, alternating between the hyper-specific and vague in ways that beg for just a little more connection. A line like “Hot sand to soothe my cold feet / Grandma had such young teeth” certainly forms a vivid picture, but not much else. Altogether though, there’s a more cohesive mood to the music than on previous albums, possibly a testament to it being Horse Jumper’s first one of entirely new material rather than a mix of new material and fleshed-out early day demos.
Past Horse Jumper albums have also seen them rely on a tried-and-true formula of spare, cumbersome build ups to incendiary finales that bring distortion and cymbals and disaffected lyrics crashing down in their full, molasses-y force. Natural Part doesn’t leave this behind entirely—“Ding Dong Ditch” and, to a much more muted extent, “Bucket of Gold” hover around this style—but the band’s clearly branching into new songwriting territory.
“I Poured Sugar in Your Shoes'' practically qualifies as breezy, with an infectious hook carrying it along as well as some of their most memorable lyrics to date (''I've got my spirit hooked on / a fishline baited with no reason why” bringing to mind Giannopoulos’ songwriting hero David Berman). “Snakeskin” meanwhile fleshes out the trio’s sound with a cello and synth chorus that paint the album’s opener in ominous tones. The two tracks are both some of the album’s strongest and the most exciting hints at where the band could head going forward.
To be clear though, this album can feel abrasive. The second half brings on the slowcore with a capital S, relishing in lethargic tempos and decadent pauses. The hooks are still there, shining through on tracks like “Chariot” and “Velcro,” where tender melodies cut through the malaise for fleeting moments of release. Again, this album doesn’t resolve its tension with the big payoffs of tracks like “Ugly Brunette” or “Volcano.” What it’s offering instead is a mix of more focused, punchy songs and subtly beautiful moments for those willing to wait through the discomfort it takes to get there.