Demo 2010

Horse Latitudes (named, presumably, for the track by The Doors) are a new band from Finland, and this self-titled CD-R is their first release. The band consists of Harri on drums and vocals, with Heidi and Vellu both playing bass. Yes, that’s right – two basses, no guitar. So what do you think this is going to sound like? Well, as you might expect, the results of this bottom-end doom dredging are thunderously deep and heavy. The four tracks of this demo add up to a 32-minute crawl through gloopy subsonic stoner swamps of rumble and resonance, with pedal effects stretching the bass notes out into torpid, tarry drones and cymbal-heavy drum work laying down the beat, minimal but meaty grooves. Opening track ‘Necrophilia’ has snarling, growled vocals which work well, but the second track, ‘Horse Latitudes’, opts for clean doom vocals in the Pentagram / My Dying Bride tradition, which don’t seem so well-suited for a sound this overpowering – when the vocals degenerate into a mass of strangulated yelps and growls, or a multi-tracked layering of harsh and clean vocals, as on the closing track ‘Healing Stones’, and it’s much better.

Of course, it’s possible to point to a lineage for this kind of sound – the Melvins, Corrupted, Pentastar-era Earth, Noxagt, and perhaps most particularly Horse Latitudes’ fellow Finns, primitive black metal pioneers Beherit (Horse Latitudes’ Harri is shown wearing a Beherit shirt on the CD insert) and the more recent Ride For Revenge, although some of these bands relied on downtuned or baritone guitars rather than twin basses for achieving their how-low-can-you-go gravitas. By and large, Horse Latitudes are getting more things right than wrong, though it doesn’t seem like they’ve found their definitive sound just yet, and those vocals in particular need reconsidering – that clean, 70s style is just too lightweight. I noticed that Andrew from Aurora Borealis Records has been giving Horse Latitudes props on Twitter, and he’s a man of discriminating tastes. Horse Latitudes seem like exactly the kind of band that Aurora Borealis might get behind, and I wouldn’t be too surprised to see them doing something together – this is just my hunch, though, I don’t have any firm information.

This review was originally written for Judas Kiss webzine:
www.judaskissmagazine.co.uk