Horse Jumper of Love — Heartbreak Rules (Run for Cover)
Heartbreak Rules by Horse Jumper of Love
For three consecutive albums over the last seven years, the Boston slowcore band Horse Jumper of Love has operated as a trio, singer and songwriter Dimitri Giannopoulos sharing sonic space with childhood friend and drummer Jamie Vadala-Doran and bass player John Margaris. This 11-song mini-album, coming a year after the last record, strips that measured but hard-hitting aesthetic to a plaintive murmur. Giannopoulos recorded the whole thing in five days, working with co-producer Bradford Krieger primarily and inviting Margaris in solely to play piano on “Chariots” one of two songs re-imagined since Natural Part.
The opening track is called “Tune Drifts Out the Window,” and that title captures this album’s introspective mood. The tune is shaped from overlapping, overdubbed vocals, a slow-moving slash of kit drums and a disconsolate rain of guitar strums. It moves with a slouching, shrugging grace, finding serenity in stasis, opening hatch-holes toward revelation in dusky, ill-lighted spaces. You feel, here and elsewhere, that Giannopoulos is making these songs for himself. You hear them by accident, drifting out of his morose ruminations. And yet there’s an airy shimmer to these songs, the strumming, the singing glitters as it catches the light.
I found myself thinking, a lot, of Jeremy Enigk’s solo work while I was listening to Heartbreak Rules, especially the great Return of the Frog Queen, which made ringing anthems out of similarly limited materials. “Queenie’s Necklace,” especially, anchored as it is by the simplest, repetitive chords, soars improbably on a keening melody. It feels like a rainy afternoon, slow and listless, and yet it gathers itself in a chorus of blurry sweetness, a mist shot through with rays of sun.
The last three songs revisit earlier material. “Sugar in Your Shoes” is a strummy, mournful take that brings out the song’s essential melancholy. The song considers the limited power of love to lift us out of a slump. Where before, on Natural Part, the muted clangor of indie rock instruments suggested catharsis, now the song feels wholly moored in internal reflection. Nothing will happen. Nothing will be resolved. This is a wallow, but a lovely, affecting one. Similarly, “Chariots” comes tamped down considerably from its earlier iteration. It sounds, more than anything, as if Giannopoulos is singing it to himself, trying to remember exactly how it goes. And finally, “Luna,” the Smashing Pumpkins cover, is abstracted to ghostly paleness, the guitar-forward rally in the original heard very faintly, through a scrim of static, if at all.
We’ve all spent a lot of time alone in the last few years, and this album, recorded during the lockdown, reflects that uncertain, unreal time. It’s not so much that Giannopoulos wasn’t recording for an audience, but more than he’d forgotten that we all existed. This is lovely, a glimpse inside someone else’s dream space, made for the artist’s own reasons but well worth sharing.
