KJ’s Summer Favorite: Chase the Horseman
KJ’s Summer Favorite: Chase the Horseman
Reviewed By KJ Layne
Chase the Horseman’s Disinformation Blues (EP) seamlessly mixes the sounds of Joywave and Radiohead capitalizing on Chase’s lounge singer vocals. Disinformation Blues consists of four singles, Happy Happy New Year!, Disinformation Blues, Duck & Cover, Sleep Slow, Dream Sweet recorded at a combination of Chase’s personal and his bandmate Ian Dobyns’s studio and Element Recording.
Happy Happy New Year! incorporates layered tracks including backing vocals utilizing monstrous filters along with Ada Brumback’s sweet voice. The song utilizes illustrious imagery in the lyrics that I feel even more now as the weather turns colder, “Leaves dead on the ground and the cold settles in…” My favorite line of the song equally laments and makes peace with previous decisions, in raising a toast-like tone, “Let’s all dance, thinking about what could have been…” The EP transitions from Happy Happy New Year! into the upbeat title track, “Disinformation Blues” which dissects so many of the relevant issues experienced in America’s current Zeitgeist. The track calls out the, “Sexist, racist, homophobes…” The third track starts off sampling audio from the “Duck and Cover” Campaign from when the United States engaged in an arms race with the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. The lyrics appear to create a metaphor between trying to protect yourself from a nuclear blast and what happens in life when everything that you want falls apart. The lyrics depict how, “All the jobs you never land, all the shit you thought you needed was gone, gone in an instant.” It alludes that there’s nothing that you can really do when things like this happen but “Duck and Cover” which we know fails to protect you from anything. Chase the Horseman sums up the Disinformation Blues (EP) through a deep retro sound in my favorite track titled, “Sleep Slow, Dream Sweet.” This track immediately made me imagine slow dancing to this song in my candlelit kitchen with the one I love the most in my arms, as Chase the Horseman’s powerful vocal serenades us.
Chase the Horseman put a remarkable EP together along with an extremely talented team. Chase co-produced the EP with the assistance of the infamous Joel Nanos and mixed by Chase the Horseman, Nanos, and Dobyns. Credits on the track include Dobyns on drums, Sklar Cowdry on bass on Tracks 1 and 2, Ada Brumback vocals on Track 1, Heidi Gluck bass and vocals on Track 4, and Chase holding it down on guitar, synth, vox, and bass throughout the EP. If you’re interested in learning more about KJ’s 2019 Summer Favorite, check out Chase the Horsemen’s various social media and web accounts:
Much love!