I'm sure many people think the dreamy side of Scandanavia has been staked unequivocally by The Ravonettes. For over a decade, the band has created guitar lines that surf their way through wide glass corridors and down avalanches of wild distortion. They have fused together demure harmonies (male/female, which is hard to tell without having seen pictures of them) that come off with a rueful sweetness - like a lover that kisses you and sticks a cigarette in your arm at the same time. But a new wind blows stronger out of the Svensk region - one that is altogether more nocturnal, saccharine and chilling. That frosty gust goes by the name of I Break Horses.
The duo's debut album, Hearts, is a textured glob of washed out melodies and chiming synthesizers, kept in line by pulsing bass drum and stilted snare breaks. Both exciting and distant, the album is reminiscent of a bittersweet relationship caught in an iceblock - the memory of which is darkened by the passing of several years. A cherished memory, but a resented one all the same. Always outlined by luminous pearl white, but always filled in with an inky, obscuring midnight-green. "Winter Beats", which confidently announces the band's existence, shimmers across an ocean of arpeggios, while singer Maria Linden floats just above the surface. Half the time it's too difficult to tell what she's singing - her low, hushed murmurs only reveal a few words in each line. It's almost as if Linden is talking in her sleep, recalling to herself more than anyone else.
Frankly, it's a gorgeous aesthetic. I Break Horses' particular lack of clarity is what makes their debut climb head and shoulders above the competition. There's a desperate intimacy here that most bands can only dream of achieving. Riding along on a crest of distorted synth lines, pushed out again and again, the band never allows you complete surrender, but they also welcome you into their arms, half-asleep, longing for an embrace. The breadth of Hearts is so sullen and anxious, exemplified on "I Kill Your Love, Baby!", where Linden softly sighs the mantra, "I kill your love/Kill your love, baby". I can only imagine this is a kind of inverted anthem for the resentment of waning desire. The relationship has run its course, the passion has gone out. Now all that's left is a slow, selfish death.
My personal favorite of all the songs on Hearts, even though they're all very good, is "Cancer", a slow-build of white-light synthesizer chords and a repeated guitar note ticking away underneath. Linden moans along, almost encouraging the synthesizer to keep going. It all culminates with heavy snare bursts, cascaded over endless cymbals. To me, "Cancer" personifies what the album is all about. It comes off like a eulogy, not only for a love lost, but an expectation never met.
I Break Horses leave all these calloused memories undulating at the mercy of their ocean. Hearts is not an album of answers, and the band never makes any pretense about that. The disenchantment of love and trust is implied, but it's delivered with such a somber resignation that any potential cynicism is disarmed. Foremost, the album is about the glue, the stitching, the nooks and the crannies that exist between our memories and how we perceive them. The space between what we felt we deserved and what we actually got. It is an area where insecurity and satisfaction go hand in hand - a place which only music can adequately describe.
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