Drowning Horse have been in the critical spotlight lately for their crushingly evil sludge-doom release,Sheltering Sky.
Even though the album was released this year, the band had most of the material planned out since 2013. The Horse have managed to overcome a series of obstacles for both the release and their upcoming tour, balancing their real lives and the relocation of one of their members to bring their punishing, lengthy tracks to stages across the country without having to change their lineup. While the Perth group’s dynamic has changed with drummer James Wills now living in Melbourne, guitarist Michael Larkins explains the band is still as unified as ever.
“We can’t do a lot with our drummer in Melbourne,” Larkins says. “We’re all an important part of the band; we can’t replace a member. It just means we don’t rehearse as much as we should, we don’t perform as often as we should, but I think the time apart is a blessing in disguise. It means we really appreciate the time we get when we get together to rehearse and perform and the like.
“It doesn’t make it stale,” Larkins continues. “In some bands, if you’re playing the same songs over and over, it can get a little stale. If you’re trying to force songs over and over again, it’s not healthy. For a bit of time apart, even playing the songs, it’s still fresh and we really enjoy it when we can do it. It’s great. We’re not ending the band based on James being away – there’s lots of bands we look up to, like Neurosis, who all have families or projects like that, so when they form it’s a rare occurrence and it could have been a couple of years between writing albums. We always want to make sure what we’re writing is perfect, I suppose – we don’t just want to write songs for the sake of it.”
Even before Wills headed across the country, the long process behind the release of Sheltering Sky indicated the band was more than comfortable to take its time and do things right.
“We’re all grown-ups, so we all have jobs and things, other commitments, other bands – we’re juggling a lot,” says Larkins. “It took a long time based on the fact that a lot of the time spent on it could only be on weekends and things like that. We weren’t in a position where we could take a long time off work or spend a couple of weeks in the studio; it wouldn’t have worked out. We probably would have killed each other after that because of the lengths of the tracks.”
Creation of new material across long distances isn’t unheard of. In 2010, an album released by a US band named Orbs (featuring members of Between The Buried And Me along with Fear Before) was created as an online project, the members working together on sound files over the web. However, Larkins believes this approach couldn’t work for Drowning Horse.
“It’s not something that we can do. We’re a band that really relies on collaborating with each other. In rehearsal, when we first started, everything was very visual-based. We’d look at each other for cues and all that sort of stuff. We’re all playing completely different things from one another – it’s not as simple as writing a riff and sending it through to each other; we really need to be in the same space to work on the new material.
“It’s unfortunate, because that means we haven’t really worked on anything new since 2013, but because we haven’t performed or toured a lot, these songs are still fresh to us. We’re motivated to perform the songs as if they were brand new.”
Sheltering Skyis out now throughFalseXIdol. Catch Drowning Horse atNewtown Social ClubonSunday November 8, withWe Lost The Sea, Thorax and Jxckxlz.
