Interventions

Horse Lords make music with guitar, bass, drums, and sometimes saxophone, but you couldn't really call what they do rock music. Rock is just a small piece of the greater amalgamation—a simple-yet-complex affair that welds repetitive riffing in strange time signatures to microtonal harmonies that glint like flecks of mica. It might be tempting to call it math rock, but these aren't problems to be solved—they're patterns that unfold as if of their own accord. Maybe "biology rock" would be more apt. It's fluid, not angular, and instead of architecture, branches and rivers and spiraling sunflower heads feel like its analogues in the physical world.

The Baltimore band has released two albums up to this point, both of which alternate switchbacking studies in rhythm and drone with noisy, knotty studio experiments. They've also released three freeform "mixtapes" containing sidelong collages of full-throttle rave-ups, modular synth sketches, and live recordings whose audio fidelity suggests that they may have been recorded to a Dictaphone at the bottom of someone's gym bag.

Interventions marks a major step forward in every way: The jams are both more focused and more hypnotic, while the quality of the recordings has a newfound clarity and fullness that does wonders for the music. Guitarist Owen Gardner and bassist Max Eilbacher play instruments re-fretted according to the principles of just intonation, and their curious tuning—intermingled with saxophonist Andrew Bernstein's complementary bleat—yields an unusual and visceral sound. It's subtle, but you can feel it vibrating in the air all around you.

"Truthers," which opens the album, plunges you straight into the band's muscular minimalism. Drummer Sam Haberman doles out a lurching rhythm in 6/8 time while guitar, bass, and saxophone pile up in teetering heaps. Their scales have an odd, in-between quality, neither major nor minor, that makes me think of Sahara Desert blues crossed with the smoldering skronk of the Stooges' Fun House. Throughout the album, they'll return again and again to the same essential themes, and the fact that "Toward the Omega Point," "Time Slip," and "Bending to the Lash" sound like they are in the same key as "Truthers" lends to Interventions' deep sense of structural integrity. But they never stop pushing forward: The unhinged "Toward the Omega Point," in which Bernstein sets aside his saxophone in order to lay down complex polyrhythms on percussion, veers into an unexpected country blues before pivoting back into Glenn Branca territory, while the brooding "Time Slip" overdubs guitars and sax in creamy waves over a toe-scuffing groove in five.

Much like their mixtapes, the excellently sequenced album is broken up by shorter, sketch-like pieces. "Encounter I / Transfinite Flow" braids taut guitar plucks and staccato sax blasts around one another like the strands of a double helix; "Intervention I" is a chiming modular synth miniature that feels like standing in the lobby of a Reno casino; and "Encounter II / Intervention II," the album's still center, is a mournful saxophone solo, suffused in reverb, that sounds like it was recorded in a dank underground chamber.

Following the punishing onslaught of "Bending to the Lash," the album closes with "Never Ended," a disorienting swirl of chants and street noise recorded at the Baltimore protests following the death of Freddie Gray. You wouldn't necessarily recognize the source material, but knowing its provenance helps explain some of the album's urgency. This is a band that believes that experimental music has the potential to be more than merely aesthetic, and every one of their choices—like taking apart their instruments and rebuilding them according to an alternate musical logic—speaks to a desire to upend the status quo. Sometimes difficult and always thrilling, Interventions asks listeners to meet it halfway—and rewards them copiously when they do.