Death Rides a Horse Death Rides a Horse • Playing time 15.50 minutes
Tracklisting:
- Death Rides a Horse
- Necronaut
The band seems forcefully driven by love for classic rock and very heavy metal and that devotion shines through on their just recently released and self titled DEMO, which dispite only having two tracks runs for nearly sixteen minutes.
On "Death Rides a Horse" the band's elsewhere quoted inspirarations like Black Sabbath, Down and Metallica - among other - become evident already by the strong opening riff, which very well could have been co-written and approved by the riff-master himself, Tony Iommi. This lays down a nice, slow doom-laden foundation for the track, upon which most the next nine minutes is built. The up tempo break about half way through sounds great, but feels a bit contrived and out of place, but the even slower pacing towards the end is serving the piece perfectly.
"Necronaut" is logically a bit shorter, but also somewhat more experimenting with a much better use of the double, the dueling guitars. It is still doomy in its core, but notably faster than the titletrack and actually has a lighter mood, not least thanks to the incongruous second guitar, despite the appearant lyrical obsession with death.
I think it is quite safe to say, that while Death Rides a Horse sounds tight, tried and tested from many and long hours in the rehearsal room, it is also clear they have listened to a lot of music of this sort, they do love it, and now they bring their version of it to town. They have perhaps yet to find an their own unique musical identity. They are certainly not originals. But they're not merely copycats either.
Both songs have a down and dirty sound, the shabby garage type of filthy, and that is really sweet music to my ears.
But especially the vocals make DRaH stand out, though it will be a required taste for sure. The production/raw mix/recording places her at a distance and I must admit, that I initially dismissed them completely exactly because of that, but ... come time and a thousand listenings I must say that she does wonders for the music.
Death Rides a Horse have just made yet another two songs available at their MySpace-page: "A Unified Vision" and "Coronal Mass Ejection". Musically both fits what's on the DEMO quite nicely, but the band have very wisely drawn Ida's fierce, forceful, frightening voice a bit forward.
In very short: This is like Black Sabbath with a female singer ... in the year 2009? Oh, very interesting, I think, and to be followed closely.
