On the band’s fourth album, Dweller (Three One G Records), Seattle Noise-Punk trio Haunted Horses treat the listener to a ghastly, gothic, sci-fi nightmare of the soul. 

Maybe it’s in the name that thoughts of the waking dead arise, or maybe it’s the swirling, ghoulish synths that coil through the album’s nine tracks. Maybe though it’s because vocalist Colin Dawson sounds like he’s actually a pet-semataried Stewart Lupton (Jonathan Fire*Eater), raised from the dead, his mind filled with bad intentions and the music of The Birthday Party and Bauhaus (presumably being what plays in graveyards when the living aren’t around to hear it). 

While Dawson has been known to wield a guitar in the past, it would appear that the band has decided that drums, bass and keyboards are the best way to present their grim musical vision, and they may well be right in that regard. 

Although Swans comparisons have been made, they are somewhat misleading. For sure, tracks like “Temple of Bones” and “Destroy Each Other” pack a meaty punch with pounding, hypnotic drum lines, but the overall atmosphere is more dark-carnival goth disco, than soul-shredding battery. 

And that’s absolutely fine to these ears. With the absence of guitars in the mix, there’s plenty of room for the thumping, mid-paced drums, the rumbling bass to flatten the terrain, like a dancing army of the dead, while the synths show an array of distressing shards of sound (complemented by Dawson’s moans and growls).   

The appropriately titled “Fucking Hell” stands out as one of the album’s most aggressive tracks, while closer “Fevered Water” hints at shades of Queens of the Stone Age (minus the guitars) in its sickly, greasy, hard-rocking wickedness, as the band closes out the album strong. 

Disturbing like a cold, concrete basement, there’s just something pervasively unpleasant about every minute of this album and Haunted Horses should be commended for having created such a convincingly grim sonic world. 

Buy the album here:
https://threeoneg.com/archive/vinyl/dweller 

8 / 10
TOM OSMAN
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