I Break Horses’ 2011 debut Hearts was a bold record, even if the Swedish duo's electronic shoegaze was hardly groundbreaking. There was an underlying brashness in their drive to make a striking first impression at the risk of having little to back it up, as Hearts was frontloaded with “Winter Beats” and the title track, the best songs on the record by an astounding margin and also total outliers from the more anodyne material that followed. All things told, it worked—after M83 dropped “Midnight City”, forever more the canonical electronic shoegaze song, they took I Break Horses on the road as an opening act, surely a sign that an upstart synth-rock band is doing something right.
If I Break Horses are emboldened by their success, it manifests in how the duo are no longer concerning themselves with making a first impression; Chiaroscuro is a muted sophomore record that seeks to dole out its pleasures more subtly and slowly. Just witness the inversion that occurs between the introductory tracks on each record. Whereas Hearts’ “Winter Beats” evolved from Christmas-light arpeggios into a conflagration of digital distortion, the subzero atmosphere of “You Burn” is a constant, putting the emphasis on the first part of the title—someone’s ablaze, but it’s not Lindén, who maintains her typically unaffected, breathy tone. Going forward, I Break Horses continue to hew towards minimal, streamlined electronics that dispatch any tie they once had to shoegaze—if there’s any woozy, pitch-shifting effects, they’re placed on Lindén‘s vocals, more akin to something you’d hear in the hauntological productions of a Tri Angle record rather than Loveless.
As a matter of fact, I Break Horses have pretty much dropped anything that could associate them with rock music. Not that guitars played a prominent role on Hearts, but they’re nowhere to be found here. And while the drums are cranked, Balck isn't trying to recreate booming arena-ready beats on minimalist beatboxes. To go even further, their influences over the past three years seem to be exclusively non-vocal electronic music—“Ascension” and “Berceuse” are indicative of how Chiaroscuro emphasizes the intricate, clattering snares you’d hear in trap, drag or footwork, rather than relying on Lindén to convey the message. Which is sensible, as Lindén’s lyrics don’t lend themselves to deep analysis, anyway. A typical line like “you burn/when words are burning/baby you burn/turn you turn/when the world is turning/baby you turn" fails to generate even a mock profundity through Lindén's portentous cadence.
But through all this reduction, I Break Horses are left with little that they can call their own. Let’s note that “chiaroscuro” is a concept that has a lot of appeal to the amateur aesthete— after all, it’s a fancy word that encompasses light and shade, black and white. Problem is, I Break Horses are typical in failing to grasp how “chiaroscuro” entails a strong contrast between light and dark as a way of establishing dynamics and volume. “Medicine Brush” and closer “Heart to Know” are meant to be the record’s tentpoles, and instead underscore the album title as a misnomer, spreading billowing synth atmosphere, drizzly treble and murky grayscale over the span of seven minutes rather than the usual four and a half. Within the context of Chiaroscuro, certain gestures emerge as hooks—the cutting punctuations on Lindén‘s vocals during the chorus of “Denial”, a twisting neon synth line throughout “Faith." But they need to stay within the context of Chiaroscuro to remain memorable.
While Chiaroscuro represents an admirable turn from what I Break Horses were doing on Hearts, the problem is that they’re moving in lockstep with their peers; even if Chiaroscuro doesn’t make the quick-strike, short-impact impression of Hearts, it lacks any means of impressing itself on the listener, something to distinguish I Break Horses from the countless electronic pop bands stuck in that vast netherworld between Chvrches’ diamond-cutting, laser-guided melodies and the pitch black abstractions of pure production acts such as the Haxan Cloak or Holy Other. None of this makes Chiaroscuro anything less than pleasant, just a record whose middling between arena aspirations and headphones listening feels less of a fusion and more of a compromise.
