As the mastermind behind shapeshifting experimental outfit Horseback, North Carolina musician Jenks Miller has played many roles: ambient auteur, doom-metal songwriter, black metal howler, producer, folkie. But he's not exactly willing to use labels—and why should he? In a recent interview, Miller avoids the slippery slope of compartmentalization by situating Horseback within a broader tradition of psychic exploration and visceral expression, birthed by the blues and embedded within the musical DNA of John Cage, Neil Young, and Richard Thompson alike: "As far as I'm concerned," he says, "all esoteric music is bonded by blood. I love it all." Indeed, Miller's sanguine palette has shifted in tone at various points throughout Horseback's seven-year existence, producing such disparate offspring as the serene, spacious 2007 debut Impale Golden Horn and its snarling, frostbitten descendent, 2012's Half-Blood. The latest Horseback album, Piedmont Apocrypha, compacts this meandering trajectory into a five-song narrative that's inclusive, intriguing, and unquestionably creepy.
That the overwhelming majority of Piedmont Apocrypha is comprised of labyrinthine soundscapes is to be expected. Horseback songs have always been dominated by Miller's repetitive, circular structures, be they're in the guise of ribbons of feedback or forlorn twang, and his mantras are the compositional and thematic cornerstones of the structures that strengthen with every verse, every repetition, and every second. At the same time, closer inspection reveals the din to be anything but static: the snakelike line of drone that runs through opening dirge "Passing Through" courses like an open wire, threatening to swallow the entire song whole at a moment's notice, while the tonal irregularity of the spindled arpeggios that drive "Consecration Blues" (created by running two amplifiers with different tonal qualities) grows more dire and unsettling by the second.
Even the prettiest of pastorals—conjured by the warm acoustic guitar of the title track and insect rhythms of "Milk and Honey"—decay the second they reach your ears, fostering a sense of dread that never goes away completely. Not even the return of frequent Horseback collaborators Rich James, Nick Petersen, and John Crouch for the 18-minute closer, "Chanting Out The Low Shadow", proffers relief. Miller's mix subdues the intensity of his death growls, and later, his singing, by shrouding them in the solemn boogie of his bandmates. As a result, Piedmont Apocrypha offers little in the way of easy satisfaction or cathartic handouts—that is, aside from the title track's combustive finale, a hot, shimmery mess that unfurls several minutes' worth of stored energy in one go.
Miller's fascination with the dark side of the human psyche resonates strongly on Piedmont Apocrypha. Delivered in a creepy, lilting tenor, "Passing Through"'s opening couplet of "I was born to lose/ I won't have this form forever" could scan as an occult-informed boast or a bleak statement of acceptance. And yet, that single memento mori soundbite embodies the strange optimism of the project as a whole: tucking into this album is kind of like taking a stroll through hell with a trusted friend.
