Equus – Eutheria

May 9, 2008 • Get a Life! Records

Yet another reason I ought to dig back into the far recesses of my music library more often: It's been ages since I last listened to (and shrugged off) Equus, but after a quick dusting-off I found that I'd cast aside a pretty nice album. Not one of my favorites, as it loses focus and meanders around a lot, but its tight and diverse sounds make it something really unique.

Equus is definitely a band that appeals to my taste in musical aesthetics: Eutheria is slow, plodding, melancholy; all the good attributes of the highly-atmospheric post-rock I've come to love. Hidden in there somewhere is a very slight post-hardcore influence; bits of Slint poke out every once in a while, in addition to some low-end riffing, though the majority of the album is decidedly in the late-Godspeed or early-Mogwai school with a bit of a heavy edge to it. It's not as generic as it sounds, either: there's a lot of really nice-sounding fuzz on the guitars and bass at times, and some awesome Mellotron doing strings and winds, giving it a somewhat proggy sound now and then.

As the fifteen-, twenty-, and thirty-minute track times suggest, Equus is a long-winded group. Each track appears to be through-composed—evolving continuously with no repeated sections—which is something that I don't care for much in longer works. While the sound itself is very consistent, the songwriting seems to go off in odd places and it's difficult to really get in a groove with what they are doing. "Hyracotherium" beats the quiet-loud-quiet-loud structure into a pulp, which makes it sound like five or six songs in the same key and tempo simply strung together; "Orrorin Tugenensis" sounds like it should end at around ten minutes but then turns into essentially another song. Now, of course I'm not advocating a three-minute-pop structure, that wouldn't work for this music at all; but trimming some of the repetition down and making the songwriting more focused would go a long way.

But if you're not paying attention too closely, it's hard to complain about Eutheria's being drawn-out. The sound of the band itself is enough to warrant a few listens. There are more than a few beautiful melodies tucked away in here, and even a few places where the music gets truly captivating. It's one of those albums that deserves to be chewed over a few times, and I'm still not quite sure how I feel about it as a whole, but I do know it's not bad.

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