A Haunting Atmospheric Journey
There are clouds in the sky and dust on the ground. Vultures circle a grayed-out factory, diving through smog pumped into the air. The silence is total, and the road is forever. This is the atmospheric, haunted alt-country path Brown Horse’s Total Dive takes for 45 minutes. It may surprise you to learn that the band is from Norwich, a quaint city in northeast England, not middle America; each of the album’s ten songs does a convincing job of dropping the group in a place run by past lives and ones missed altogether.
Rough, jagged guitars—the band doesn’t skimp on reverb—buoy Patrick Turner’s vocals, which do a mean job imitating the sort of world-weary cowboy role he inhabits. The result is visceral and raw, twangy and lucid. The album crackles with muscular guitar lines and dramatic lyrical flashes. With songs written by each of the band’s four members, Total Dive creates a humming world well-populated by Brown Horse’s imagination.
Lyrical Depth and World-Weary Storytelling
Turner’s is the voice of a storyteller, and his lyrics confirm it: corridors are “rambling capillaries”; writing is “swilling words in my glass.” Grounded, salt-of-the-earth melodies keep Total Dive from floating into the realm of the self-indulgent, but the album’s best lyrical moments are also its rawest. On “Twisters,” an early highlight, Turner moans, “I hope a whip of lightning cuts me right in two,” as backing singer Neve Cariad’s delicate soprano hovers above him.
On the title track, which also acts as the record’s inflection point, Turner sighs the slogan of an endless postindustrial life stretching out ahead: “Don’t wanna work so hard anymore.” As he rumbles forth, slashing guitars fill the air like that aforementioned lightning; you can almost feel the sky go heavy and cool the air.
The Mythic Mundane
“Hares” sees Turner and his crew ramble up and down the octave, cruising on smooth drumbeats and sliding strings. Unhurried and intentional, the track is one to savor. Turner seems to realize just that: “I see,” he notes in a sweet moment, “that time on earth is worthwhile, and there’s nowhere else to go.” On “Wreck,” a moody prism replete with delicious hammer-ons, finds Turner spinning the mundane into the mythic. “There’s a fury in this soil,” he warns, mere moments before ribbing “the kid in the Hard Rock Café T-shirt” who kicks them out of the bar. The song’s refrain sears its way into your mind with the quiet profundity that marks the record’s best moments.
A Self-Possessed Vision
There are times on Total Dive where the theme verges on gimmick—moments where the prose is too blown out, like “I keep you poems in a biscuit tin with the bones of the mice that the cat dragged in some years before.” But overall, the album is a set-piece cleanly executed and clearly imagined. Brown Horse sounds right where they want to be. Total Dive isn’t just a concept come to life, but an album that weighs you down on purpose, foaming with tumbling words, sticky guitars, roiling bass lines, and militaristic drums. The record marches ceaselessly forward while you sink to your knees in the muck of Western folktales. What we’re left with is a record that’s part-Jason Molina, part-Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and entirely self-possessed.
