HAUNTED HORSES

There is nothing quite like the sound of a grim dystopian future arriving unexpectedly and burning your house down. HAUNTED HORSES have seen the future and it's fucking horrible. "Dweller" is a bruising and occasionally exhausting attempt to make some sense of it. Mired in the post-industrial grind of GODFLESH, but possessed by the chaotic spirit of gothic post-punk, these Seattle-based art terrorists sculpt eerie collisions between whirring, buzzing machines and the frantic horror of pulsing, twitching life. Between the monstrous, unpredictable beats that hammer home these tales of existential squalor, and perpetually agitated vocals that emerge from disorienting shadows, switchblade in hand, they have struck upon a cunning and compelling formula.

An artful cacophony, "Dweller" is ugly, brutish music for lost souls. The unthinking chatter that hastens humanity's swan-dive into the abyss has no chance of being heard over the muscular racket that HAUNTED HORSES are blasting out. The opening "Dweller On The Threshold" is thudding, mid-paced punk with a cold, mechanical heart, and with perfectly acceptable echoes of KILLING JOKE thrown in for good measure. "The Spell" is spikier and more esoteric, doomed and disembodied vocals skittled around by a murderous, unrelenting noise rock waltz, and "Grey Eminence" is a howling, offbeat ritual, assailed by world-eating distorted bass and drunk on the dubbed-out menace of minimalist techno. With vocals that suggest that someone involved has spent a lot of time listening to the first two SWANS albums, possibly while high, the excellently titled "Fucking Hell" is as bleak and bilious as it gets; while "Temple Of Bone" is bottom-heavy, tribal crust-rock with a shimmering backdrop of blistered concrete.

Frontman Colin Dawson's morbid holler battles it out with disintegrating riffs and collapsing drums on "Dweller In The Abyss", while "Destroy Each Other" harks back to the conveyor-belt clatter of COP SHOOT COP, but with a GODFLESH-inspired bass tone that sounds like steel gears meeting human teeth. "SEED" is an absurdly gnarly combination of BAUHAUS-like theatricality and injurious, UNSANE-style riffing, and "Fevered Water" showcases a more measured and sinister side to HAUNTED HORSES' downward spiral, with pummeling, post-punk drums, looped feedback and scowling, leather-trousered disgust in abundance.

Despite the unremitting grimness of it all, "Dweller" brims with hostile energy and could even be considered danceable, albeit only in a desperate, end-of-the-road kind of way. If we're all going to Hell, we might as well enjoy it.