- Actually, a horse would come in handy right about now
When Horse the Band make music, it sounds like a demented soundtrack to Castlevania. The five Californians call their sound “Nintendocore,” recreating those infamous 8-bit sounds of early video games into their bizarre version of metal music.
Keyboardist Erik Engstrom is still credited with “Game Boy” as an instrument on their newest record, 2009’s Desperate Living, although the band is increasingly toning down its gamer hints on its fourth full-length album since 2003.
The 12 new songs seem to be inspired by two new visions: the John Waters movie of the same name (a creepy lesbians-on-the-lamb film) and the band’s crazy upheaval since 2007’s A Natural Death (where they’ve torn through three drummers, three agents, two bassists, a bunch of labels and been sued). The new record is full of frustrations from a band that’s a little too weird to really ever make it big, mixing a fury of hardcore, noise rock and electro into something that sounds like dying robots, exploding keyboards, laser-fitted guitars and that Legend of Zelda ocarina flute of time. We e-mailed keyboardist Erik Engstrom to get the full scope on Horse, the album and its constant musical misadventures, coming to Peabody’s Saturday night. —Keith Gribbins
Is the band on tour now? I assume HORSE the Band is always on some constantly chugging, around-the-world tour.
I am actually at my parents’ house in Lake Forest, Calif., right now. Sometimes we go home and rest for a while. I have three days in between six weeks in Africa and the start of our U.S. tour right now.
You were just on “The Reigns in Africa Tour,” which began in late March and extended into April? How did that insanity go?
It was …. weird .. and good. 12 shows in 17 days is really weird, especially since three were in the Cape Town area and three were in the Johannesburg area. We aren’t used to not playing every night and not moving. So it felt like the tour never really started. It felt like a vacation with occasional shows, but South Africa and Mozambique were pretty awesome places. It’s hard to convey anything about them in one line, other than whatever your perception is, it’s probably 100 percent wrong in a good way, unless you’ve been there, even if you consider yourself informed.
Do you have a favorite tour destination? Since you guys tour the earth [the band’s Earth Tour traveled 40 countries], perhaps you can tell us what’s your favorite town to play?
I think we really only get genuinely excited when we are in a place where you can tell the scene hasn’t been ruined yet, where everyone is in a band because they want to be and they’re passionate and don’t get any weird status for being in one. Where they’re still outcasts. Kind of like… Mozambique. Or, I don’t know. Anywhere like that. There aren’t many places left I don’t think. Probably the best city to play in is Moscow or Minsk, and New York and L.A. and Singapore and Hong Kong.
Let’s talk about Desperate Living — great album — you guys are really capturing your sound and vision. And well speaking of around the world tours, the exhaustion of doing your infamous Earth Tour is when a lot of these songs were written? Is that right?
We wrote them after the tour was over, and after another European tour, but yeah, I think… in that year of insanity we really cut a lot of bullshit out of our lives. We were really all actually at the end of our rope at one time or another and realized what “real” emotions felt like or something. I’m not sure if that is going to make much sense but I think it’s what happened. So we cut a lot of unconscious posturing out of our music and had much more focused vision and understanding of what we were feeling and wanted to convey. Other than this nebulous sort of… ehhhhh about disillusionment in college or some bullshit.
This article appears in May 12-18, 2010.