Kill Rock Stars
2007
Pick Up Sticks
About This Album
Fitting in perfectly with the Pacific Northwest's experimental indie scene is They Shoot Horses Don't They, a multi-instrumental, avant-garde-flavored group out of Vancouver who make polyrhythmic, Eastern European folk-influenced rock reminiscent of early Modest Mouse, Pink Mountain, and KRS labelmates the Paper Chase. Leader and guitarist Nut Brown has a voice that borders on frantic as he sing-talks his way through the ten tracks on the band's second full-length, Pick Up Sticks, speaking abstractly and sometimes nonsensically of body parts and magical lands and strange relationships, sometimes all in the same song. This is music that's hard to categorize, and because of that, it's easy to forget that most of the album, in fact, is rather unvaried. Because both Brown and the instrumentation behind him avoid actual melody and focus instead on layers and fills, the songs have a tendency to blend into one another, creating a 40-minute set of horn bursts and guitar strums and keyboard squeals and bass drum kicks on the downbeat, a kind of crazed circus rant that, despite the number of instruments used (nine in this case), sounds very hollow and even sparse, like the gypsy wagons clanging down a bumpy dirt road.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6 and 7)

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