Palehorse don’t appear to take themselves too seriously, with a few tongue-in-cheek promo shots that include corpsepaint, cups of tea and the morning papers. What is serious though is the cruelty and severity of the cacophony that is their music held within this new album Harm Starts Here and it’s the clashing of these two opposing views that makes the album something worth exploring, if only once.
Broadly speaking, these Londoners are dirty sludge played at a snail’s pace for the most part but with the occasional burst of velocity for good measure. Slimy and slithering bass make up the heavy low-end while vocally, these shrieks and barks sound like someone left a voice recorder on in a mental home.
Harm Starts Here is something of an endurance test too, clocking in at over 55 minutes and with lengthy song running times, the band certainly have a lot going on within each passage. Plucking elements of Eyehategod and Iron Monkey, Palehorse have also stirred the pot with some more contemporary sludgy influences that flirt with judicial levels of melody.
First track ‘What Is Wrong With You People’ sets the tone straight away, first toying with noisy synths and a moody bass led intro before erupting with caustic vocals and the tone takes a noticeable nosedive into the abyss. Palehorse’s meandering nature can be difficult to wrap your head around but a song like the eloquently titled ‘Don’t Bitch My Shit’ will still lodge itself in your head like no tomorrow.
Palehorse haven’t exactly reinvented the wheel on this album and there isn’t exactly anything on it that’s a breakthrough for the genre, which isn’t a slight in the band’s ability in anyway. However, Harm Starts Here is a solid work of sludgy dissonance served up with an (un)healthy level of vitriol.
7/10
Jonathan Keane