RIDER/HORSE - Select Trials LP

Highly recommended.

One hundred miles north of NYC is a post-industrial hardscrabble up-and-down town called Kingston that currently lies somewhere in-between. Kingston is where Rider/Horse came to exist, and where they now call home. Before the Rider/Horse team-up, Cory played guitar and sang in Spray Paint, while Chris was a hired gun for the likes of Trans Am, Les Savy Fav and Scene Creamers. When normal life forced them to press pause, the construction of Select Trials became an almost daily obsession / meditation for the duo.

“Tremolo Harm” is a high-tension wire that leads into the horizon-vanishing tones of “Chime Inn.” Other tracks, like “Guns In The Snow” and “Prawn Ranch,” radiate with drum-driven menace, echoing Big Black’s foreboding clang.

"Spray Paint was always one of the busier garage-y post-punk bands of the prior decade, releasing a slew of albums, singles and even some curious collaborations. I couldn’t figure out if they were living in Austin or Australia or both, but ex-member Cory Plump has allegedly relocated to Kingston, NY, where he started Rider/Horse with Chris Turco. Now there’s doing Rider/Horse together, and it certainly sounds like a record from two grown men well-versed in what the (post-)hardcore scene has had to offer over the last twenty years and keenly aware of what they’d like to contribute to it now. In this case, it’s a lean and mechanical form of downer post-punk. As a two-piece who presumably had some decent studio access (even if it’s just one of their homes), they clearly had time to play around with things and massage these tracks into more than simple-sounding live takes: drums appear to be cut-up and looped at times and live at others, and the guitars take on a variety of forms, from discordant chemical peels to chiming melodic leads. Reminds me of Psychic Graveyard, Big Black and Exhaustion, as well as Spray Paint and Trans Am to an extent, though Rider/Horse like to leave a little breathing room in their music." - YGR