reviewed by Michael

The final song of this band’s debut LP, a song called “Haze Blues,” describes this band’s music absolutely perfectly.

Just by looking at the band’s name and their cover art, I for some reason made a mental comparison to Ghostkeeper, the Calgary band that put out their fantastic self-titled sophomore album last year. As it turns out, Jay Crocker was involved with the production.

As for their sound, there is a little bit of Ghostkeeper in this band. Deadhorse seems to also possess a fondness for the unpredictable, albeit with longer songs (two songs are six minutes and over). Surprisingly, these long songs don’t seem gratuitous at all.

As I said though, calling this band’s genre haze blues would be perfect. When the opener “Interstellar Remedies” begins it may take you a few seconds to orient yourself. It starts with a simple guitar riff but quickly layers on some vocals with reverb and an awesome bass line. The song eventually gets really musically dense and is such a pleasure to listen to. Lots of musical haze, so to speak.

“Glam Central” kicks things up several notches with a crazy amount of harmonica and guitar making for a song that’s likely to get an audience dancing (possibly moshing?).

For the rest of the album there are a lot of awesome guitar solos and unpredictable tempo changes like in “Upon a Mountain High.” The band also shows they can calm down with songs like “Cushion.”

The album ends with “Haze Blues” which is an instrumental frenzy. There are so many things going on there that I couldn’t even begin to describe it.

I didn’t realize that I would like this album as much as I do now that I’m writing this review. But it’s so incredibly refreshing and is a wonderful start to the year 2011. This band has set the bar high.

Top Tracks: “Glam Central”; “Upon a Mountain High”

Rating: Hunting Call (Excellent) +*swoop*