Horse Jumper of Love capture emo magic live in Newcastle
Around midway through the Armlock’s support set, the fellow in front of me began taking off his fleece; by the time Horse Jumper of Love were playing ‘Death Spiral’, he had finally managed to remove it. However, for an unfathomable passage of time, beneath flailing arms and a t-shirt, he simply couldn’t stop from riding up, this unknown hero provided first-rate comedy while some of the most crushingly heartbreaking tracks of recent times rang out. This is why we go to see live music.
How can you ever expect to see such a sight unless you buy a ticket and leave the house? Perhaps nothing in your life will ever provide such a jarring juxtaposition of beauteous music and astoundingly awkward buffoonery. This is why you ought to see Horse Jumper of Love on their present tour—not just because their stirring brand of grunge gaze will move you more than a moody teenager’s mood swing, but because you never know what else you will be greeted with outside of the closeted world of algorithms.
Crammed into Newcastle’s humble Cluny 2, the Boston band sent countless mullets saying as they rattled off tracks from their latest album, Disaster Trick, alongside classic cuts. Capitalising on The Batman-like vibe cast by Armlock, a dense moodiness pervaded as the band emotively weaved from light shoegaze moments to heavy grunge explosions with all the grace of a caterpillar on a razor’s edge.
This was a heady show which captured the halcyon days of many audience member’s emo early years. Performed with a bristling sincerity, both Armlock and Horse Jumper of Love never once shirked the stark battle of light and shade in their music. All the while, a Patagonia fleece performed a strange sort of one-man crowd surf in the front row, oddly humanising the whole thing in a most peculiar way.
Had the band seen this, it seems it would’ve been appreciated. After all, after battles with addiction, frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos’s has cited that a strive to see the light in things formed the crux of the inspiration behind the new record.
Though a slowcore blend still forms the main core of the sound, there is a hint of a smile detectable beneath his gorgeously wavy locks as he stands off-centre and croons his way through lyrics about an Amazon Basics Bible and relationships of the brink with brooding energy.
As Far Out‘s own Arun Starkey wrote of the record: “While the record is certainly a departure of sorts, it’s also a natural progression and one that many fans have likely been expecting. The sparse and often bleak slowcore that made them such favourites remains, as do the frank lyrics, but things are more atmospheric than they’ve ever been, with the newfound heaviness augmenting proceedings. This is a wholesale success, given the artful character of all their work.”
A few hundred nodding mullets, students in Halloween costumes, and a jacket that refused to be removed testified that things are just as emotive and moving live. Slacker is still very much alive.
