Brown Horse – Total Dive Review

Brown Horse has offered a quietly consistent, growing discography over the last five years. Their sound is confident and warm, their interest in detailing fresh ideas for a genre overstuffed with failed revolutions is inspiring. It’s what keeps Brown Horse going, and what makes Total Dive such fun. An album a year has been the band’s trajectory and listeners are lucky the group appears set on continuing this trend. Their third album in just as many years is a continuation of a sound which needs more ears pressed to it. Total Dive will, like All the Right Weaknesses the year before, be a winner for those wanting more from the alt-country stylings of the modern day. They’re always innovating, and that becomes clear with Total Dive in its first few moments. That heaviness heard from Neil Young’s rock and roll days, where grunge became the great distance-maker between new sounds and past experiences. Brown Horse nails that feeling on their third album.  

One of their best songs is their opener. Sorrow Reigns is exactly what the band needed in their repertoire, and they sound delighted by the chance to engage with that style further. Instrumentally brilliant work across the board for Brown Horse. Another successful understanding of what the genre needs not just musically, but lyrically too. Winding instrumental sections, the back-and-forth between those electric guitar thrills and the foundation of the genre and its countrified roots, it’s what Brown Horse balances so well on the likes of Twisters and Comeback Loading. Crucial to it all, though, is a hearty story which separates itself from the rest of the genre. Country and country-adjacent music is in a dire rut now. How the genre stars find their way out is not up to them. It’s up to groups like Brown Horse, whose adaptations of what still works for country music fed through the same tough rock and roll stance as the greats before them. Make no mistake, their name will be up there, and deservedly so.  

Gorgeous wordplay and that instrumental charm which lingers on the mind as relaxed but relentless when paired with the tough love of the writing, Brown Horse has consequential work on their hands. Just a beautiful album to lose yourself in. Heart of the Country is that winding, rock style which highlights just how much unexplored depth there is to guitar-led rock even now. Three albums of consistent, constant quality is what Brown Horse has offered. Total Dive is a languid moment for the band whose efforts pay off. Latter stages of Total Dive, particularly Wreck, play around with that feeling of not knowing where the road ahead will lead, and feeling satisfied by that unknowing quality. A few glimmers of accordion here, a smattering of percussion charms there, it all comes together well for Brown Horse on what may be their most important work to date.  

Songs like Oblivion profile the band at their very best. Gliding instrumentals, songs of damnation and worrisome moments which would light the fire beneath anyone with an ounce of passivity left in them. Brown Horse features a spirit rarely found in music. There’s a desire to do more, to be better, at the core of their work. Total Dive is an outstanding development to their sound. It’s a development like no other and it makes all the difference as the band keeps on pushing. Album closer Watching Something Burn Up is a delight of a closer, a song which readily defines the purpose of Brown Horse as a group, and the core of their album. Total Dive has the spirit of country at its heart but there’s more than a few moments where the group looks to adapt and overhaul the very fundamentals of their sound and, by extension, the alternative country scene.