Boston's Horse Jumper of Love are a self-proclaimed “slow rock” trio that, despite declaring themselves a band, more strongly resemble a solo project. A few years into their career, the group’s already busted into the top tier of the Boston house show scene—a considerable accomplishment for any young rock band, considering the scene’s predilections towards snoozy folk and hostile hardcore. But while Horse Jumper of Love's live performances recall the low, slow burn of bands like Silver Jews and Arab Strap, their Bandcamp output hinges on one man: lyricist and frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos, whose combination of wan croons, melancholic strumming, and ramshackle production place the group’s erstwhile recordings in Microphones territory.
Like their local, recently-disbanded contemporaries Krill, Horse Jumper of Love seek to balance the intimate with the acerbic. Now, with the arrival of their full-length debut, the time has come for those two spheres to merge. Drummer Jamie Vadala-Doran and bassist John Margaris plod at a tortoise-like pace, dragging their leader’s acoustic arrangements out of the bedroom and into the open. These songs’ momentum may be minimal—Carissa’s Weird look like the Casualties by comparison—but their warmth proves deceptively hypnotic, making the deviations more attention-grabbing. On “Ugly Brunette,”the trio draw the listener into a lull by way of syrupy, straggling chords only to repeatedly trip up the beat, the whammy-wailing hook swaying like a drunkard. The leisurely arpeggios on “Spaceman,” meanwhile, spiral gently into the void until they’re swallowed up by a fuzzed-out roar. There's suspense in the slump.
Where Giannopoulos the musician seeks to pit sheltered songs against haggard arrangements, Giannopoulos the lyricist is up against the universe at large. He’s openly admitted in an interview with the Allston Pudding that as a teenager, he thought “nothing was real,” angst worsened by the cultural and linguistic divides inherent in his Greek-American upbringing. Rather than tell meandering stories à la Slint, Giannopoulos repeatedly shifts his focus to hyper-specific (if awkwardly-worded) motifs: “America towels,” “July 5th,” and “i love you very much forever,” the latter two of which title transitional lo-fi interludes. He’s a natural at creating sensual, oddball imagery ("Peel an apple with your nails/and there is dirt and there is juice,” “I talk with your teeth,”) but his descriptions feel distant and needlessly vague.
For a full length record, Horse Jumper of Love is actually pretty scant. Three of the eight songs comprising its less-than-thirty-minute runtime are inconsequential ambient pieces that serve little purpose aside from creating the illusion of momentum and progress down in the doldrums.(Their inclusion feels inevitable, given Giannopoulos’ prior dabblings with electronics in the band’s early material and with his solo project the Meat Tree.) The penultimate track, “Sun Poisoning,” proves downright unlistenable; Vadala-Doran, a serviceable percussionist on the rest of the album, suddenly fumbles around like a novice, struggling to keep in step with his bandmates’ funereal pace. The result is a meek introduction to a modest band that feels simultaneously overdue and undercooked.
