RVNG, an imprint that writes some of the smartest hype stickers and one-sheets in the business, describes: “The album’s twelve pieces are layered and interwoven, tonally and rhythmically complex––moiré-like patterns of interaction and tessellation that play out for both mind and body, full of sonic warrens with an inescapable groove. An electrifying leap forward for the band’s shared language, Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! aims to liberate the listener into a spiritual, ecstatic, and utopic dimension of sound.”

To which we might add, to us Horse Lords and their musicality always felt akin to Henry Cow, Art Bears, the Recommended catalog.

And there may be regional American historic antecedents too: the rhythmic and melodic complexity of Richmond’s Orthotonics and one of our favorite Downtown acts V-Effect, which featured Rick Brown, Ann Rupel, and David Zonzinsky. Both of those projects involve humor, shronk and politics alongside complex rhythms. Two of our favorite bands from the 1980s! Go Rift Records!!

We loved Horse Lords live album, As it Happened: Horse Lords Live (RVNG 2024), which doesn’t involve any of the vocal elements presented on this new LP, though it does begin with one of the greatest introductions to a live record since Kiss Alive! by Jacques Palminger’s “bam, bam, bam,” followed by a very long description in German.

These folks are really good at sequencing their albums. We are album people, so grateful for their care.

A genuine leap forward on this new album, while still maintaining their punctuated rhythmic sensibility and unique tuning systems. Beginning with what we take to be their first use of (here processed) vocals (again, think Dagmar Krause!!) this is a fantastic addition to the Horse Lords discography!

olks recommending themselves and others all the time. DM’d to death, that’s the retail POV in 2026.

A few trusted voices act as a filter, in this case maestro Chris Brokaw, who writes some notes on the back of this one and appears on a bill with same today way down the #southbrooklyn corridor at @mamatriedbk

_I Belong to You: An Introduction to Milo Jones_ (Tar River Records, 2026) collects this elusive craftsman’s music from the last 20+ years and somehow still comes off sounding like a single voice/session/take.

Brokaw purportedly took lessons from Jones around the turn of the century and one wonders how those studies may have given direction to CB’s The Hand that Wrote this Letter (Capitan, 2017) CD where he presents new and totally timeless versions of Bowie and Prince: a masterclass in arrangements and approach.

And this Lp, “Milo Jones,” a name and face we assume is a persona, has been working consistently over the last thirty years on a similar course, fusing originals with covers/standards from the songbook and beyond.  Think: Dino Valente, Cole Porter, Lee Hazlewood, Randy Newman, Jackson Brown, etc.; mix in some Johnny Paycheck and Serge Gainsbourg and a picture or field of reference begins to come into focus.  

That said, like this atist list, Milo Jones’s vocal and musical voice occupy their own space entirely, a kind of fluid b/w languid appeal that, if it wasn’t so American in dialect, we might compare to John Martyn.  And like Martyn, there’s an element of something disturbing or, as Brokaw describes it, “pervy” moving between these tracks and voices. The ease with which these tunes roll across these two sides (think Jorma Kaukonen!!) is pretty mesmerizing. And the subtle warble on the guitar during the last track, titled “Undertow” (2005), proves a perfect closer.  

The beautiful lyrical delivery always countered by content: “Man-size action hangs from the falafel vendor,” halal gotta have it, I guess.  Brokaw claims the line “really gotta let loose all over your caboose” references urination. 

Very little information on line about MJ, but it appears he has lived, beyond Boston, in North Carolina. And that one of his songs was performed by the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Skeptic folks in the shop wonder whether he may have even been in that nineties project. Holy Mammoth! Yesterday when MJ was in the shop he looked exactly like the face on the cover. Which leads to our Haino persona question: “Does he shower with those shades on or off?”

From Tom Carter:

“Music in Continuous Motion, Bill Orcutt's latest entry into his 21st-century repertoire of quartet guitar music, pointedly steps away from the cut-and-paste constructivism of Music for Four Guitars into a sonic stratum that's yearningly melodic, resolutely human, and built for performance.

Conceived for a 2026 NYC concert, Music in Continuous Motion shares the concision of its predecessor -- but rather than the discrete, mechanistic precision of Music for Four Guitars, the tracks on Music in Continuous Motion unify -- each song weaving four gleaming threads into the warp and weft of an evolving, complex texture that employs simple, repeating motifs to build new melodies from counterpoint itself. It accomplishes this in the most efficient manner possible: most of these 12 tracks hover around two-and-a- half minutes, each iterating first the substrate, then the melody and its variations, then slamming shut like a clockwork music box.

Based on previous recorded evidence, Orcutt is fond of boundary conditions for his studio guitar records. Much of the time, his launchpad is obvious; with others, it's intentionally obscured. When recruiting me to write about each release, he might send me a clue. Although any given dispatch is a potential red herring, up until now, each has implied an Oulipian conceit (however obtuse) that at least somewhat determines the outcome. Thus, I was a bit surprised by his statement on Music in Continuous Motion. Whatever overarching form the recording process may have mapped out, the path of the finished album is explicitly poetic. Echoing its predecessor, the song titles, read in sequence, paint fleetingly-glimpsed forms -- but in contrast to the distant shapes described in Music For Four Guitars, the present narrative spotlights the dance of polygons momentarily grasped (and then lost) as they spin through space. Ultimately, the key difference between the albums (and what places Music in Continuous Motion in the realm of poetry) is its celebration of movement over immutability, of melody over form, of music as a hot wire to the heart rather than another upped ante in an arms race of inscrutability."

From the one-sheet:

“For those paying attention to the arc of Orcutt's electric records, which chart a course from Quine's choppiness to Thompsonian/Verlaine-ian flow, it should be no surprise that the ten-year gap between acoustic records should expose a similar underlying journey. But what's maybe more surprising is that Jump On It, with its living-room aesthetics and big reverb, packs a disarming intimacy absent from the formal starkness of Orcutt's earlier acoustic outings. Although you might sense the looming human in the audible breath whispering intermittently between chords (a physical flourish reminiscent of the late Jack Rose), such documentarian signposts are the exception rather than the rule. Not quite refuting (yet not quite embracing) the polish of revered watershed records by Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, or Bola Sete, Jump On Ittreads a path between the raw and the refined, exemplified in tracks such as 'The Life of Jesus' and 'In a Column of Air' that alternate swaying chords with Orcutt's trademark angular quicksilver runs (cut brickwall short). While you won't mistake Jump On It for incidental music, at least not if taken at full strength, stray passages radiate a conversational beauty that would please the most dissonance-adverse listener.”