While remaining loyal to a ruminative sound rooted in slowcore tradition and largely distinguished by the alternately tender and quietly anxious vocals of
Dimitri Giannopoulos
,
Horse Jumper of Love
have developed their sound from album to album, including both strengthening and clarifying their early lo-fi approach on releases like the 2022 studio effort
Natural Part
and 2023's
Heartbreak Rules
, which was mostly home recorded. With their fifth album,
Disaster Trick
, the group offer their noisiest, most high-contrast album yet.
Giannopoulos
credited the more deliberate, energized sound to his newfound sobriety since recording
. Recorded at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina,
also finds
Horse Jumper
working with producer
Alex Farrar
(
Wednesday
Indigo De Souza
) for the first time and includes contributions from
's
Karly Hartzman
and
MJ Lenderman
Squirrel Flower
Ella Williams
, and
Maria Gelsomini
, who represents the sole appearance of synthesizers on the album (on "Heavy Metal"). The record opens with a few acoustic strums and then a grungy attack on "Snow Angel," a heavy, plodding track that successfully evokes the ideas of cold, isolation, and longing. The ringing guitars and smears of feedback continue on relatively lighter, dreamier songs like "Wink" and "Today's Iconoclast" before the album arrives at the somnambulant "Word," a song about the distortion of reality that features ambling guitar solos and minimal bass drum, cymbal taps, and late snare on two and four. Like many of the tracks here, it was partly influenced by a work of art: In this case, a lyric was inspired by the drawing of a witch milking an ax instead of a cow in the movie Häxan. Elsewhere, "Snow Angel" took a kernel of an idea from the
David Berman
poem "Snow." Later on in the track list, songs like the thunderstorm-featuring "Heavy Metal," the haunting "Death Spiral," and comparatively uptempo "Nude Descending" juxtapose melody and dissonance and the personal and the representational to poignant effect. It's an album that one can't help but to imagine making for impactful concert moments. ~ Marcy Donelson