Horsebath, a good band in possession of a bad name, give fair warning in the first song off their debut album: “It’s hard to love, hard to love, hard to love me,” goes the repeated refrain. A later lyric admits understanding “the weakness of a moving man,” referring to the ways the band’s heavy touring schedule disrupts relationships, romantic or otherwise. It might sound presumptuous or even aspirational for a band to fill its debut with songs about rootlessness and the road, as though the quintet might actually be looking forward to all those good-byes and all those long drives. But Horsebath has been rambling around Canada for a few years now, putting thousands of miles on the odometer as they’ve defined a distinctive balance of rambunctious barroom energy and rootsy, open-plains melodicism. Another Farewell is an album whose outsize musical palette—weird cowboy songs, streamlined saloon rockers, big-hearted folk tracks, pastoral psychedelia—is rooted in their wanderlust.
Playing songs about roaming, Horsebath make no bones about gesturing toward other artists who’ve played songs about roaming. They venerate The Band, of course, but also Neil Young, the Buckaroos, Hank Williams, and the International Submarine Band, and they ignore the skeleton frames of burned-out bands who’ve driven these same highways. “In the Shade” has more than a bit of Gram Parsons’ cosmic country sound, but Horsebath find unexpected ways to convey spaciness, primarily by filling every empty space with swirls of ominous organ chords. It all makes the chorus—“I run from the sun and I hide in the shade”—sound that much more haunted, like Mutter is crawling out of a dark hole.
Because the road so closely informs the music they play, Horsebath can’t help but romanticize their own wanderings, and Another Farewell’s spry twang and imaginative arrangements make for a rip-roaring road trip record. You can hear as much in the barrelhouse piano that counts the highway lines on “Hard to Love” and the tentative strums that festoon the high-lonesome waltz “Don’t Know What It Is.” They play the Clash-style “Train to Babylon” like they’ve caught a glimpse of calamity in the rearview mirror: “This train ain’t bound for glory,” they harmonize, simultaneously inflating and puncturing the romance of the road. There’s a fraught, even desperate quality to their travels, as though they can’t stop running, and that compulsion generates excitement and rumination in equal measure.
Horsebath find inspiration in that ambivalence, which allows them to carve out a distinctive niche in roots music. “Never Be Another You” opens with a lengthy instrumental passage that sounds like the Ventures trying to surf in Bakersfield, then transforms into a Stonesy rocker. The two ideas are jammed together into one song, but the players savor the friction of so many tempo changes and stylistic rugpulls. With its jazzy melody, languid strums, and brushed snare, “Only in My Dreams” could be a late-’60s cover of a tune from some lost Depression-era musical, and closer “Turn My Lover Loose” hinges on a go-go organ vamp that suggests they’ve got a Sir Douglas Quintet 8-track stuck in the dash. It’s a curious finale. You might expect a road trip narrative to end on an emotionally climactic note that signals personal growth or a change in perspective. Instead, to Horsebath’s credit, they wrap things up with a rowdy rave-up that fades out as they drive off into the sunset. It’s not an end to their journey, but a cliffhanger hinting at more exploits to come.
