The Man Born From Inside of a Horse is the debut full length album from Brighton's Everyone To The Anderson. It will be released through Unlabel on Monday in a limited edition run of hand-made die-cut screen printed sleeve CDs. It will be a work of art-rock record worth cherishing. For years I have been saying this is the best band in Brighton and for years I have no real idea if anyone has been listening to me or not, yet for years I have repeated it as one of the truths that I know. Their Doodlebug EP is a flawless rush of brawny adrenalised frayed-nerved noise rock, as numbingly acerbic as it is cerebrallly exciting and vice versa. If you can verse that vica. The tracks on that were long and drawn out weighing in their peaks with a measureed build. At under half an hour the 11 tracks that form '...a Horse don't so much as blast past, they burn right through you leaving their figures imprinted deep into your synapses, so after even brief exposure the glottal breaks in the opening riff will stalk your walk. This is the kind of music you play on headphones at other pedestrian's peril as you involuntarily contort in thrall to the direction of the music, the momentum of each track will keep your feet moving as your mind and shoulders meet in unified spasm. There's a dryness to the vocal deliveries that recalls Steve Albini - there's a lot of Fugazi to the guitars. Even inside the heart-burstingly lush melody of So You're Saying There's A Chance there lies a kernel of grit that keeps it mean to the core, but the chorus keeps unfolding out in even more attractive layers like the petals of a rose attached to the idly savage thorns of its' stem, and it's an analogy that you can pull through plenty of the tracks on the album; one of the keys to its' potency a passive aggression - distortion and harshness, angularity, edge all co-existing and harmonising with unexpected softnesses, a gnarliness overlaid with prettiness; veils of shimmering delay, the pregnant hum of warm feedback, patiently held guitar tones, Ben Gregory's voice. Then the beasts attack all barking, snarling and frothing at the mouth. The build of Pocklemouse could end you up anywhere but it chooses to whip itself into an almost uncontrolled frenzy.
And therein lies the second key to the effectiveness of this album: Restraint. Another Albini reference, and another lesson transcended by this band. Illustrated in the track title Let's Take This To Smithereens; you know what that censored word should be and it makes you rage at the replacement of it. Hold on to that thought, because it will be released through the course of the track, all in distinguished, unhurried time. There's an elegant poise to the execution of every aspect of this album, a sharpness the eludes description (how very convenient for me) and can only be felt while listening. There's a sense of dark humour and a sad sense of nostalgia to some of the lyrics like "We're carving our names into the spine of a tree, hello we were here in August 1990", a sense of self-deprecation "we need a space six feet high and just enough wide, we'll only be passing through", and some kind of sensuality "It's skin on skin", breathed heavily, the exact nature of the breath's intent ambiguous. Which leads to the final keystone holding the album together, the most addictive quality it has to offer is something it doesn't actually offer directly but keeps elided from the listener. You will not be able to turn up this loud enough to ever overwhelm you as much as you want it to, there's something so tantalisingly distant about the way it will never submit to you but strides on and off indifferent, in its' own little world.
In 2011, rock music doesn't get much better than this.
