Homeshake’s Horsie is an atmospheric sedative

Turn up the reverb until an Appalachian cavern would blush at the echoing, and then put an all-call into a Cigarettes After Sex fan forum asking for help with a guitar line. You have now been more industrious than Homeshake could muster for his second helping of auditory ambience, this year.

The image of Peter Sagar clocking in with a punch card to his laptop comes to mind; the near-complete lack of artistic growth for the better part of a decade lugs in the idea that this is filler as art, high-functioning time killing. If the dual records he’s released in the first part of this year are proof of anything within his artistic abilities, it’s that music truly can be a 9-5 with bankable income. Clock into Ableton, Ctrl+V, and clock out.

To apply a lens of focus absent within the making of this record, the Homeshake sound is somewhere between a clinically depressed Daft Punk playing “Something About Us” at half speed and the music one imagines would play during prom for Netflix’s Addams Family remake; that is to say without a subversive edge or care, with only a corporate gesture toward dark sensibilities. It’s hollowed out by reverb and sparse instrumentation, yet the nuance or serenity which would justify such an approach has long been drawn-and-quartered.

The odd moment where a compelling vocal line or loud(er) drum sequence arrives, a glimmer of hope shines through your earbuds like a flower growing through concrete. However, as each track is sure to remind the listener, they will be paved over once again by the industrial tools of repetition and anonymity. Good moments become decent minutes, which mortifyingly last until they’re achingly boring tracks. Like the heroes of slowcore and lo-fi indie Homeshake pulls from, the assertion that it is ‘background’ or ‘vibey’ music seems bereft of criticism for those wanting auditory sedatives instead of intent: something to have on, rather than something to activate.

Here’s a test. I often try to remember each track on a record after the record is finished as an unofficial way of recalling its memorability; I could remember each detail of the 32 tracks of Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee from my first listen, as is the case with world-shattering, sacredly-endowed masterpieces such as that record. I could not remember a single track from Horsie simply because each attempt ended up remembering each track at once, homogenized and attributed to the whole.

There is no condemnation waiting for Homeshake as “lofi indie beats to listen to your parents’ divorce to” play ad nauseam. There is only the contradictory riddle at the heart of his sound; either he admits doesn’t care at this point, which is not the least bit concerning for the future of the project, or this is what it presents as when he does care, a proposition so frightening I would advise lying.