Disaster Trick is an incendiary and stark return from Horse Jumper of Love

Revisiting and refine the pricklier gestalts of 2019’s So Divine and 2022’s Natural Part, releasing their fifth album, Disaster Trick. The climate is still one characterized by bleakness, acute crisis juxtaposed with free-floating ennui. Dimitri Giannopoulos’s vocal remains decidedly plaintive, as the singer explores desire and disconnection, searching for meaning in a solipsistic world.

Throughout their oeuvre, Horse Jumper have carried the flag for templates forged by slowcore pioneers Low, Codeine, and Duster, among other bands. While various contemporaries, including Deathcrash and the hardcore-leaning Sadness, have produced eclectic or even revisionist responses, Horse Jumper have functioned mostly as loyal ambassadors more than innovators or firebrands. With Disaster Trick, they continue to operate in a similar fashion.

That said, these templates have remained surprisingly relevant. A song such as “Lip Reader”, for example, with its soft/loud formulae and tip of the hat to Elliott Smith, conjures an uncertainty pertinent to the current zeitgeist. Giannopoulos’s burdened vocal illustrates the strained presence of the underdog, outsider, and/or marginalized figure within the western milieu. Intermittent flares of distorted guitar speak to the fraying of humanistic and democratic norms, the pervasiveness of self-doubt.

On “Snow Angel”, guitar eruptions bring to mind the electric side of Neil Young. John Margaris and Jamie Vadala-Doran sustain a rhythmic foundation not unlike Crazy Horse’s Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina. Lyrically, various declarations and non sequiturs point to upheaval and disorientation (“My teacher is gone”, “it feels evil in the dark”). “Wait by the Stairs” works with similar principles, a prominent guitar oscillating between crystalline arpeggios and grungy strums.

With “Curtain”, Giannopoulos attempts to process a break-up but foot-faults into cliches (“Do you have what it takes / to break another’s joy? To treat their heart like a toy?”). “Word” features Giannopoulos’s diaristic bent, recalling Phil Elverum’s plunges into grief following the death of his wife, Geneviève Castrée. However, while Elverum’s unadorned language and mercurial sense of restraint highlighted the ineffability of his loss, Giannopoulos’s vignette is overly oblique, occasionally lacking cogency. A listener finds himself craving a seductive melody, a haunting image, a vocal that at least momentarily transcends the singer’s deadpan default.

“Gates of Heaven”, meanwhile, shows the band working more effectively with stoner and slacker tells (“sweaty bills in my back pocket”). Instrumental interludes swing between urgency and, well, lack of urgency. “Nude Descending” is a blurry mise-en-scène, evoking a creepy/alluring sexual vibe a la Eyes Wide Shut, the band moving between noisescapes and cleaner, staccato rhythms.

Melancholy vocals, fractured images, sonics that move between the stark and incendiary, check, check, check. A number of guests, notably Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman and MJ Lenderman, seem underused, though various touches and textures do indeed enrich the project. Disaster Trick is engaging, at times modishly compelling. Like much of Horse Jumper’s previous work, though, it doesn’t depart significantly from the canonic playbook, unfurling as derivation or emulation more than a recasting of the genre.