In the music video for Twisters, there’s a tiny cardboard house that’s carried through a tornado, landing somewhere in the forest. It’s a scene that recalls The Wizard of Oz, only if it took place in the depths of the UK’s wilderness with an indie cast to boot. Drawing deeply from their folk-country roots, Brown Horse are just that: a torrent emerging from the myths of Americana blended with their own distinctly British outlook.
Since All The Right Weaknesses was released last year to stellar reviews from Uncut and MOJO, Brown Horse have been keeping themselves busy. In the past year, the band have supported Arizona folk artist Courtney Marie Andrews, played a string of gigs across Europe, and headline shows across the country. Total Dive, their third album, comes as Brown Horse solidify themselves as rising stars within both the UK and American country scene.
With images of poems kept in biscuit tins and the tangle of stained hands, Total Dive sees the band deepen their talent for connecting the personal with the existential. It’s a skill that made previous albums powerful, but this time there’s more space for malaise, with a lyrical paintbrush that feels sadder, closer, and more grounded. Lead vocals from Patrick Turner retain their emotional power, coming through at their strongest and most sincere. Turner’s voice is at the beating heart of the album, at once vulnerable, other times angry, always swirling around a mesh of jangly guitars and drums.
Whereas All The Right Weaknesses felt homely, cosy, lived-in, Total Dive transforms that musical patchwork into a worn-out landscape and empty grey sky. There’s a world of things decaying, and lyrics from across the album speak to a sense of bleakness. This post-industrial cynicism makes way for a new country-gothic sound emerging from Norwich. Songs like ‘Sorrow Reigns’ do this best: recalling crumbling buildings and violence occurring on the pavements. And in true gothic fashion, this setting becomes the stage for stories of relationship breakdown and painful memories on tracks like ‘Wreck’ and ‘Comeback Loading’. It’s not exactly the desire to run for the hills (a la Wuthering Heights), but it’s the kind of music that makes you see why the lure of the road is so enticing, why the urge to get away from the place you grew up in is so strong.
It would be reductive to suggest the album is just being sad about the state of things, though. There’s a poetic voice to Brown Horse’s music that lends beauty to even their most pessimistic lyrics. With songs written by each of the four band members, Patrick Turner, Nyle Holihan, Emma Tovell and Rowan Braham, the band carefully steer away from self-indulgence. There’s a sense of feeling like an outsider, both to the chaos in the world and in your own life. It’s ironic and detached, but it also allows for some of Total Dive’s deepest moments of introspection. A feeling that brings the album to its haunting finale on the closing track ‘Watching Something Burn Up’, a song that builds like a tornado until its narrator gets swallowed by the sound.
Instrumentally, Total Dive sees Brown Horse mature the self-described slacker twang they’re now known for, pitted as ‘somewhere between the stark country rock of Uncle Tupelo’ and ‘the raw intimacy of early Cat Power’. Delicate additions from folk singer-songwriter Neve Cariad and drummer Ben Rodwell bring this sound fully into its own. Waves of jangly guitar peppered with church-like synths provide gusts of intensity that land perfectly between moments of reserve, making what may be their most musically grounded work to date.
In the midst of what might feel like the end times, Brown Horse bring a magical spark to the existential. Heavy, knotted, but full of life, Total Dive is the sound of a band firmly on its feet but crafting songs that could be made from the other side.
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