Brown Horse’s Total Dive reviewed: a bleak, blazing ride through doom and distortion

The tracklist for Brown Horse’s third album in just over two years reads like the band’s songwriters have clipped their song titles from headlines in the kind of morbid newsletter that keeps even hardened doomscrollers awake long after the lights have gone out. As clues to the album’s prevailing moods, they’re often starkly explicit. Opening an album, for instance, with a song called “Sadness Reigns” hardly promises that what follows will be especially lighthearted, inclined to frivolity or even modestly reassuring, especially when there are songs coming up with titles like “Oblivion”, “Wreck”, “Heavy” and “Watching Something Burn Up”.

Brown Horse announced themselves with 2024’s Reservoir, a memorably confident debut that drew on a lot of familiar noise, including Uncle Tupelo, AM-era Wilco, David Berman’s Silver Jews, Songs: Ohia. The video for the album’s “Sunfisher”, meanwhile, fleetingly featured a photograph of Emmylou Harris, a Bruce Springsteen poster, an Uncle Tupelo sticker on the side of Emma Tovell’s lap steel and another on top of it of Maybelle Carter, cool tips of the hat to some of their key musical touchstones.  It was impossible to imagine them not growing up with albums by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Gram Parsons, Gene Clark and The Flying Burrito Brothers on the family stereo. By the time they played two great shows at the Kilkenny Roots Festival in April 2024, however, just months after Reservoir came out, it was clear how far they had already moved on from the album, the band moving at a pace you could appropriately describe as a gallop. They’d already recorded its follow-up, All The Right Weakness, which when it came out a year later had a very different sound. Denser, deeper, more aggressive, with enough musical muscle to make Reservoir sound retrospectively scrawny, a little underfed.

At the time, the band’s robust new sound was attributed to a newly acquired status as battled-hardened road warriors, as if a couple of UK and European tours was the equivalent of The Hawks backing Ronnie Hawkins for five years straight in roughhouse joints across north America on their way to becoming The Band. It’s as likely they merely read the reviews of Reservoir, noted all the references to their presumed influences and simply decided that if in future they were going to be compared to anyone, it might as well be themselves, so launching into All The Right Weaknesses with more abandon, the music louder, more expansive, more *them*.

Even trace elements of those early influences barely linger on Total Dive, long since supplanted by the kind of guitar-driven racket associated with what’s lately been called “independent country”, a kind of post-Americana that sounds suspiciously like what used to be called alt.country or even insurgent country. This includes most notably MJ Lenderman, Wednesday, Ryan Davis And The Roadhouse Band, but also terrific bands like Philadelphia’s Florry and North Carolina’s incredible Fust, both bands fronted by quite brilliant songwriters, respectively Francie Medsoch and Aaron Dowdy. Brown Horse, of course, have *four* outstanding songwriters competing to be heard. In the circumstances, Total Dive is once again remarkably cohesive. Fortunately, no-one’s felt the need to write a novelty music hall number for the drummer to sing, go temporarily rap, raga, funk or Swedish death metal. Their “Jazz Odyssey” is obviously still mercifully some way off. The songs, whoever’s written them, are consistently about separation, departures, loss, ruin. Memory plays a large part in them. Travel, too. It’s almost always either night in them, or the creepy pre-dawn hours. The weather is invariably awful.

The album opens with the first of Emma Tovell’s three songs. “Down here cold, blood and sorrow reign,” Patrick Turner sings, sounding as breathless as a man being chased by a mob with pitchforks. His voice is almost consumed by a spectacular guitar gush and much lashing lap steel, the whole vaulting thing underpinned by Rowan Braham’s surging keyboards. Tovell’s lyrics are sparse, fraught, exclamatory, by the song’s end desperate. Her other two songs on the album are “Heavy”, seemingly inspired by an odd childhood memory and a dead fox, and “Oblivion”, a song that imagines the world’s dead being shot into space to burn or rot among flotillas of space junk, interplanetary body disposal frankly a subject not widely enough covered in popular music.

There’s a sense everywhere on the album of termination, things – friendships, relationships, lives – coming apart or to an end, the whole circus tent coming down in a smoldering heap. The landscapes in these songs, usually moonlit, sometimes covered in ice, littered with rusted and abandoned cars, reflect a strange decay. There’s a kind of rot in the air, dank and menacing. “There’s a fury in this soil,” Patrick sings on one of his songs, “Wreck”, about a couple long past love driving through a cold dawn, the land around them as angry as their own moods. The music, in turn, at least at first, seems full of upheaval, turmoil, seething guitars, Tovey’s searing pedal steel, a pretty relentless noise. There’s a dramatic urgency to a lot of this music that’s sometimes distantly reminiscent of the REM of, say, “Begin The Begin”, or the wild upheavals of “Just A Touch” from Life’s Rich Pageant, perhaps the dark churn of Document’s “Oddfellows 501”. There’s certainly nothing here with the bright hum of Reservoir’s ecstatic “Sunfisher”. Only the instrumental coda of Rowan Braham’s elegiac “Hares” brings a moment of fragile solace, Patrick’s violin evoking some ancient melody, older than time; an echo perhaps of the folk quartet Brown Horse originally were.

Elsewhere, Nyle Holihan’s “Twisters” offers a solitary fatalism and invites personal calamity – “I hope a whip of lightning cuts me in two” – while on the title track, he’s bleaker still. The song apparently captures a relationship’s final crisis, a moment of decision for its narrator. What he wants from his former lover now is distance, not intimacy. “Just think of me as a place you can’t go anymore,” Patrick sings. There’s a softened pleading, on the other hand, to Patrick’s lovely country rock lament “Heart Of The Country”, guitars glowering like vintage Crazy Horse, “Cortez The Killer” coming quickly to mind, and the even more gorgeous “Comeback Loading”. The song is forlornly addressed to someone long gone from his life who was previously central to it. “Do you still listen to the Boss sometimes?” he wonders. “Thunder out over the edge of town, nothing but darkness on the road behind.” Rowan’s accordion and Nyle’s mandolin add appropriate flourishes to a particularly fecund mix.

Rowan’s “Watching Something Burn Up” is the climax the album’s been heading inevitably towards. A torrent of words, cryptic, enigmatic, evokes fires in the night, collapsing buildings, “the chaos of miracles”, forgotten gods, stars crashing from the sky; a doomsday lexicon. The music as it starts is ominous, seeping, eerily recalling the creeping menace of Thin White Rope’s simmering “Crawl Piss Freeze”, the epic closing track of their sensational 1987 album, Moonhead. The first musical shockwaves hit about three minutes into the Brown Horse track, as it seems to slowly erupt in a time-lapse detonation, a turbulence that settles briefly before becoming one long crescendo that ends, like everything else, in silence.

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