Skin Horse at Aquarius Records, September 06, 2008
Category: Music
Local folks may have seen these guys tearing up stages around town. Although maybe tearing up isn't precisely what these guys do. They're much more of a brooding behemoth. But they're much more than that. Almost confusingly so (but in a good way!) Anyway, Skin Horse are a trio who traffic in long stretches of plodding doom, mathy jangle, and epic post rock, laced with haunting atmospherics and deep black ambience.
This 3 song cd-r is their debut, and each of the three tracks is totally different, and in some cases almost sound like different bands, but somehow, the tracks do manage to fit together, a little disjointedly, but still strangely cohesive.
The opener begins with a sheet of guitar noise under static and strange voices, soaring harmonics, and rumbling drones, when the band do finally kick in, it's a sort of slowcore, dronedoom hybrid. Plodding and downtuned and heavy, but weirdly melodic, the guitars heavy and abstract, the drums a caveman pound, vocals a harsh shriek, Khanate fans will be all over this, as will all ultradoomlords.
But only maybe until the second track, which begins with dark minor key guitar jangle, which erupts into some awesomely nineties sounding mathrock, all clean guitars, and convoluted arrangements, before locking into a spiraling freakout, all tribal rhythms, and squealing feedback, a stuttering riff and swirls of FX, launching immediately into the final track, another blast of angular clean guitar mathrock, but structure like doom, so the chords ring out, the drums crash, but there's tons of space, some super abstract arrangements, killer dynamics, all wrapped around a super intense main minor key melody, the kind of stuff we could listen to forever, before again, locking into an extended outro, a cool woozy chugging groove, that eventually gives way to a brief stretch of moody Slintish drift to finish off.
We've been inundated with post rock metal bands, or post metal or whatever, but Skin Horse are as far as we can remember the first band to fuse math rock with serious doom metal, and we're definitely up for hearing more.
Packaged in hand sewn, hand screened red or black pouches, LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Silent Ballet Review, AUGUST 14TH, 2008
Category: Music
Score: 6/10
Skin Horse's self-titled debut is a rather interesting beast – an album that gets stronger and better as it progresses. This young Bay Area three-piece is uncertain how best to describe themselves; on their website, they define themselves as "somewhere between the genres of Doom, Drone, Sludge, Metal and Experimental." Fortunately, they structure their album in a cohesive fashion, beginning with the sludge and drone and working their way up to the metal. Listening straight through, one can easily imagine some primordial creature working its way up from the morass, placing stubby feet on the muddy earth and slowly crawling forward, tongue flicking, eyes blinking away the algae. In The Velveteen Rabbit, the Skin Horse is the character that tells the rabbit the facts of life: that becoming real will take time, and pain: "By the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you become loose in the joints and very shabby." While this certainly doesn't sound very pleasant, and implies entropy, the true meaning is that of evolution, of progressing beyond the physical plane. Skin Horse attempts to tell this story in song, replete with jagged edges.
"Act I: Confined to Shadows" begins with hiss, feedback and drone, elements that swirl excitedly, waiting to coalesce. Incoherent voices mingle in the static. A guitar begins to warm up. Slowly, the voices become more distinguishable, the guitar begins to strike recognizable chords, a drum establishes a dirge-like beat. Just shy of the nine-minute mark, a male erupts in scream-song. In the twelfth minute, a quicker melody breaks out, a call-and-response between the guitar and the twinned bass and drums. By the end of this opening track, I was intrigued, but disappointed that the song had taken so long to develop.
"Act II: Ecdysis," a more well-rounded track, continues the album's evolutionary theme. Ecdysis is the molting of an exoskeleton, which is discarded so that a newer, stronger exoskeleton can grow (but of course you knew that, right?). This track begins in the same way that the former track ended, with call-and-response, and then cascades into a series of ascendant chords and drum rolls, as if foreshadowing a Japanese monster's first destructive steps. This time, the guttural vocals take nine and a half minutes to rumble through the speakers. As the track gets longer, it gets meaner and darker. The overall effect is one of gathering momentum, which will be let loose in the concluding track, "Act III: Peel Back the Sky."
"Peel Back the Sky" (which actually begins 20 seconds before the end of "Ecdysis;" downloaders be warned) is the album's most fully-formed song, beginning with accessible riffs and crunches and establishing a melody within the first minute. This melody stops after every few bars and then repeats with different intonations, at a higher tempo, gathering energy as it builds until collapsing in an implosion of drums. At this point the sludge and doom return, bringing us full circle. Again the disembodied voices, again the screaming, again the build; but then, sadly, a long fade-out, which leaves us, like Romeo, a bit unsatisfied.
Skin Horse's sound still needs to be tightened: certain passages tend to meander or slip into repetitiveness, and could do with a nip-and-tuck. But overall, this is a worthy demo. All three tracks are available for preview on the band's MySpace page, which takes the trepidation out of ordering, and those who order the hard copy will be rewarded with a hand-sewn canvas case.
-Richard Allen
Maximum Rock n Roll, JUNE 23RD, 2008
Category: Music
The Bay Area's Skin Horse is named after a character in the Velveteen Rabbit but this isn't music for little children. Most would call this doom though of the experimental variety, and it's only heavy occasionally. I hear some Mindrot and Morgion elements on this three-song album that stretches out to 50 minutes in length. Not particularly my cup of tea but a lot of Bay Area heads dig this sound. You can hear the whole album on their Myspace site:
www.myspace.com/saidtheskinhorse
They're in search of a label for this Billy Anderson produced release.
Written by Dave
Maximum Rock n Roll
Issue 302, July 2008
LOWCARD REVIEW, MAY 25TH, 2008
Category: Music
As the story goes, producer Billy Anderson (Melvins, Neurosis) heard these guys play a show and said, "I'm recording you." Fast-forward one year and a rough mix of the yet to be released, yet to be named CD lands in my inbox. The timing is perfect: I'm laid up in my apartment with an injury, drinking red wine, popping Vicoden, constipated, and imagining my life circling the drain. I hit play, and am confronted with the soundtrack to my demise. Heavy, atmospheric, abstract, and sparse - seven minutes into "Act One: Confined to Shadows" I realize I've been lulled into a meditative state. Before I can ask the Horse the question, "Non more black?" she detunes, retards, and sends me swirling deeper into the abyss. Ambient Metal? Find you own classification for the freshman masterpiece.
Written by Hamid
Lowcard, Issue 23 05/08
http://lowcardmag.com/
http://www.myspace.com/lowcardmagazine
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