BROWN HORSE
Reservoir LOOSE 9/10 Country rock from East Anglia, haunted by disquiet.
THIS quite stunning debut album by Norwich-based Brown Horse opens with a track called “Stealin’ Horses”, not entirely a song about equine larceny. It’s in fact a song about a song heard on late-night radio that the song we’re listening to now becomes, “Stealin’ Horses” morphing into a version of Jimmie Rodgers’ 1930 country touchstone “Muleskinner Blues” that turns it into a lament for the lost love who’s singing the song on the radio. Rodgers would likely be baffl ed by what’s become of “Muleskinner Blues” in Brown Horse’s transformative take. The yodelling oldster might have appreciated the lap steel, accordion and banjo, Patrick Turner’s keenly felt vocal. But the slurred guitar and lap steel lines, raw and humming like something on a Thin White Rope record, would probably have him running for shelter in an outhouse, hands over his ears, shirt tails apping.
Literary critics, alternatively, might be quick to leap on the song’s central conceit as an example of modernist intertextuality; one text referencing another by reworking or revising an original text, that kind of thing. While this is pretty much what Brown Horse do on “Stealin’ Horses”, it rather makes what they pull o here sound schematic, premeditated, self-conscious. It’s anything but. One of many great things about Reservoir is the sense everywhere of spontaneity. Most of these songs give the impression of being written as they were recorded, the music taking shape as it’s being played.
Brown Horse formed in 2018 as a folk quartet, with Patrick Turner (vocals, guitar), Emma Tovell (bass, lap steel, banjo), Rowan Braham (keyboards, accordion, backing vocals) and Nyle Holihan (guitar, backing vocals). Drummer Ben Auld was enlisted in 2022. Additional vocalist Phoebe Troup joined in the summer of 2023, just before Reservoir was recorded in four days at Sickroom Studios in King’s Lynn. By now they were a self-described country-rock band, echoes in their music of Uncle Tupelo, early Wilco, Silver Jews, Will Oldham, Jason Molina’s Songs: Ohia, especially 2003’s The Magnolia Electric Co. You would not be surprised, either, to nd their record shelves full of albums by Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Gram Parsons, Gene Clark, Emmylou Harris, The Band and The Flying Burrito Brothers. If you’re hungry for songs about star-crossed lovers, lives on the losing end of everything, Brown Horse serve up three full courses of heartbreak, with shared plates of loss and grief and side dishes of tears and regret. A classic country menu, in other words.
There are four songwriters in the band (although there’s a collective credit for the music). Turner’s written ve of the album’s 10 songs, including “Stealin’ Horses”, the prettily forlorn “Shoot Back”, the turbulent “Silver Bullet” and elegiac closer “Called Away”. On the radiant “Everlasting”, Turner at rst sounds like he’s celebrating the old hippie dream of getting it together in the country that makes you think of Traffic at Sheepcott Farm, The Band at Big Pink, Plant and Page at Bron-yr-aur. As the song unfolds, however, you realise Turner and his friends aren’t quitting the city to sing Incredible String Band songs around a campfire. They’re running for their lives, catastrophe looming. What Turner hoped would last for ever isn’t in this instance true love. It’s the world and everything in it, now in danger of ruin.
Elsewhere, Holihan contributes the brilliantly ecstatic “Sunsher”, guitars glinting like light on water, a dappled sound, enhanced by ddle and accordion. Emma Tovell weighs in with two particularly arresting songs. The title track is an eerily brooding evocation of loneliness and suicide that recalls M John Harrison’s 2021 novel The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, a queasy portrait of diminished lives in a half-lit postbrexit Britain drained of hope and purpose. “Bloodstain” is similarly gripping. A couple are looking back at their own past, some indelible stain on their relationship, their bleak angry mood reected in the estuary landscape the song describes over seething guitars, Turner and Holihan by now going full Crazy Horse. There are two songs by keyboardist Rowan Bramhall. “Outtakes” is a handsome ballad with cantina accordion and saddle-sore guitar twanging. Album highlight “Paul Gilley” is a long, dreamlike eulogy for the little-known country songwriter who wrote the lyrics for “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (“the saddest song that Elvis ever heard”) and who drowned at 27, lost to watery obscurity even as at least one of his songs assumed immortality, a poignant irony that’s inspired perhaps the most haunted song on an album full of ghosts.