Pulled Apart By Horses – Tough Love (Album)
Pulled Apart By Horses are a four-piece musical force from Leeds whose highly acclaimed eponymous debut album made waves throughout the deepest and darkest depths of the music industry, and it seems that their second offering Tough Love follows directly in their debut’s legacy with their brand of experimental post-hardcore math rock blasting at you with all the remorse of multiple murderer, but unfortunately with a bit less of that bite that they are so well known for.
Don’t get us wrong, please: technically this album is perfection. As soon as the thuggish chorus of lead single and first track V.E.N.O.M. makes its presence well and truly known by smacking you in the face repeatedly you can understand the raw talent and passion this band have for their music-making – that is absolutely
Don’t get us wrong, please: technically this album is perfection. As soon as the thuggish chorus of lead single and first track V.E.N.O.M. makes its presence well and truly known by smacking you in the face repeatedly you can understand the raw talent and passion this band have for their music-making – that is absolutely
undeniable. The track Shake Off The Curse is further proof of this, with a schizophrenic chorus that just won’t leave you alone and a whole lot of tension-building in a way so subtle that you’ll be doubting your own mental sanity by the time it packs in, but that’s the very issue that we’re dealing with: The whole album is as anti-climactic as you probably think this sentence was. The first four tracks really dig deep into your adrenaline reserves with soaring majors, unnerving minors and enough screaming to rival a precocious child who hasn’t got their own way, but the rest of the album got up and went to the pub with the other diggers and didn’t bother passing any of that magical substance up to your brain, or most importantly your heart, before it had a pint or six of the amber nectar.
The thing that we’re finding so frustrating here at HevyPetal is that we shouldn’t feel this way at all, but we do: This album is a masterpiece of its genre; an absolute advancement in paving the way for the future of post-hardcore and alternative rock for many years to come, but there is something we cannot put our our collective fingers on when it comes to how this album affects us emotionally, or perhaps the very lack of that elixir of musical life.
Although it is clear as crystal that Pulled Apart By Horses have put their blood, sweat and tears into this sophomore effort, which should be commended in every way possible, there’s a certain emotive inadequacy that leaves our poor hearts wondering what they’ve done to deserve the metaphorical cold shoulder from this release. This album is hypothetically brutal enough to start riots in the very streets of your hometown, and as heavy as the weight of the guilt we feel for not being inspired by this work of art, but it simply missing an unspecified connection that would have made it one of the best albums of this year by far. In the most warped way possible we wanted these tracks to come at us and kick the shit out of us, but they didn’t, which is truly a great shame.
In conclusion, Tough Love is a release that will definitely broaden your musical horizons even if it doesn’t quite inspire you to paint a post-modern masterpiece or jump off a cliff or something of equal excitement value. In all fairness, music does not have to be awe-inspiring or magnificently exciting to be fantastic music, as this album proves, but the amount of power that Pulled Apart By Horses should and can provide just fell short of setting the HevyPetal boat out on the crest of the musical wave this album’s tide has created – don’t hate the sailor, hate the wave.
