Snowman
The Horse, the Rat and the Swan
Dot Dash
Snowman has manifested the menace that has been latent in its work for the past few years. On The Horse, the Rat and the Swan, this Perth band has emerged with eyes afire, hair frayed and nostrils flared. It’s an intensely primeval work – unmistakably furious, pounding and unrelenting. It emerges from some fuming bog (Perth?), not some stylised marketing algorithm (SonyBMG?).
Where on earlier releases there came flashes of originality, The Horse, the Rat and the Swan comes fully formed as the band’s own thing. On ‘The Horse (Parts 1 and 2)’, they intone, like some crazed mantra, “death to the 90s, death to the 80s, death to the 70s, death to the 60s, death to the 50s, death to the 40s” etc – suggesting a violent rupture with the past, or at least the ideal of ridding ourselves of the uncritical nostalgia at work in such designations as the “80s”. It’s something the band takes up musically as well as lyrically. The record has many others swimming around in its antediluvian swamp – The Birthday Party, Liars, Scott Walker, even Mr Bungle – but The Horse... blends all of these to its own primitivist ends.
All this violence, though, is tempered by an awareness of its largely bruising nature, hence the mannered, dramatic melancholy elsewhere. Right after the percussive thrills of ‘The Horse,’ for instance, we get ‘Diamond Wounds’ – a deep-voiced and stately ballad, brushing up close to David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and The Divine Comedy (of all things). “Awake from the wreckage and the ruins,” the narrator informs us, “you fall asleep in other rooms”.
Snowman can swell and swoon with the best of them, but it’s the insistent pounding they do so well here. The throb of the rhythm section is never far away when things lay dormant. It’s the percussion and dissonance that invokes menace throughout The Horse..., both elements pushing everything onward in some bloodletting quest to find...who knows? Meaning? Love? Community? Politics? Culture? Life? Whatever it is, the drive seems innate if not utterly insatiable.
Ben Gook