Rocking Horse Music Club 2025
Giving a tune to Kerouac’s turn of phrase, American art-rockers – and Tony Banks as a creative guest – stage a sonic spectacle to stop the listener in their dusty tracks.
The Last Pink Glow
Even though they sometimes sing about working man or money, progressive rock acts’ dalliances with realism are seldom successful, and their obsession with literary sources is rarely rooted in stories which deal with ordinary existence. However, the works of Jack Kerouac proved to be widely influential, to an extent of a certain group’s classic platter bearing the title of “Beat” and comprising quite a few references to his oeuvre, yet that remained a unique incident until ROCKING HORSE MUSIC CLUB took the idea further up on the road and delivered a record not only based on “The Haunted Life” the acclaimed writer once lost the manuscript of, but also blessed by his estate. No strangers to conceptual thinking, as 2022’s "Circus Of Wire Dolls" demonstrated quite impressively, this collective have never adapted a particular book into their own melodic narrative, and the first attempt to do so became a catalyst in their stylistic deliverance.
Whilst those possessed of less imagination would concentrate on the first part of their chosen genre’s name, without displaying any proper progress, and shun the second one, Brian Coombes and his associates aren’t averse to rock with abandon, as the album’s penultimate number “Big City Small Town Blues” suggests with a lot of swagger, describing the potential shenanigans the novel’s protagonist is up to Lowell, Massachusetts. And if there’s a sense of foreboding in this track, the same semi-transparent darkness will have been assessed, before it appears in the running order, via riveting multi-guitar passages of “Haunted” – whose post-Dust-Bowl dynamic perspective, voiced by Justin Cohn, should take the listener’s breath away – as well as the heavenly vocal harmonies and Myron Kibbee’s fretboard filigree of “The Haunted Life” which features the piece’s co-composer Tony Banks on ivories that ride ever majestic. Yet whereas the dramatic, riff-driven “If We’re Silent & We Listen” gets high on sweeping waves of a string quartet and gets anchored with Brenden Harisiades’ anxious bass, the spectrally soulful, sax-smeared “It’s The Small Things” and the ruminative “Changing Channels” – in which Coombes’ keyboards reign supreme – show the New Hampshire ensemble’s undiminished love for pseudo-deadpan synth-pop.
That’s why it’s so unexpected when “The Ballad Of Joe Martin” goes for acoustically painted Americana and “The Ballad Of Wesley Martin” for an equally emotional, albeit slightly otherworldly, Appalachia, thus setting the scene for melancholic “Splitting Atoms” which offers routine philosophy in an immensely spiritual, warm way, with female backing reaching for stratosphere. This is the way the record’s epic finale, its titular track, and mostly instrumental “Restless Wanderers” transform into an increasingly sepia-tinted, finely detailed panorama, a series of aural pictures requiring repeated spins and staying with the spectator for a long time. Haunted, indeed: a delicious tour de force.
*****
