Territories Cover Art

Red Horses in the Snow- ‘Territories’

 

Bold, lofty marketing to say this album “explores themes of space in the age of technological acceleration” leading to explorations of contemporary alienation. This is what the press release for ‘Territories’ by Red Horses in the Snow says, but sadly the record itself doesn’t quite articulate itself so deftly.

The album starts in reasonable if plodding style with ‘Airborne’ which uses the initial stuttering guitar arpeggio as a springboard for broad, inoffensive waves of minor distortion.

 

‘Santa Irini’ starts promisingly- initially floating and cosmically shrouded in shimmering layers. Before long, however, it starts to get lost in some perma-stoned, quasi-psychedelic 90s shtick. The band is undoubtedly influenced by some seminal shoe gaze bands. Which is perfectly fine. Only they sound more like the residue of a weaker Sigur Ros or Cocteau Twins rather than a preferable, if unoriginal, duplicate of these band’s finer moments.

 

On ‘Rosemary’s Song’, the album takes a truly testing, grueling turn. Five minutes of suitably bored vocals and a guitar part which presumably is supposed to be an introspective arpeggio but in fact just sounds like someone sporadically hammering the final aimless nails into the coffin of this drab rehash of 90s haziness that was never that good in the first place. Wishful thinking? It really grates.

 

Perhaps this is a masterpiece in post-modernist meta-sonics by a band who understand art better than we. In wishing to express lament, depression and introverted alienation in contemporary times, perhaps RHITS are purposefully creating a record which is barren of all joy, a dark sponge of a record which eats up any traditional notion of enjoyment in order for us to truly grasp the record’s themes. Wishful thinking? It really grates.

 

Perhaps the temporal dislocation which the press release speaks of can in fact be connected with ‘Territories’. The album and band exist in an odd, untouched puddle of space and time. Strangely, no genre is truly theirs; yet they have a shadow of many. Occasionally they get it right and are placatory and willowing. But overall, the album is just a smorgasbord of different diluted, uninspiring genre conventions with no real flesh behind it.