World Line, Eviscerated by Horse Torso

For a lot of us, we remember with pristine clarity a moment in our early teen years when we really discovered music, when we found an album that nurtured us, that changed us, that vibrated the strings of our souls that we didn’t even know were there. Thinking back to their own experience of this critical, life-changing moment, New York improvisational no wave band Horse Torso wrote World Line, Eviscerated in a heroic attempt to rekindle that naive wonder. Clutching at this moment retrospectively feels a bit like struggling to hold dry sand, which all the more means that this band has to cross boundaries and innovate to attempt this incredible feat. Our result crosses the weightless, immobile chords and harmonies of Slint with the bebop impulse to fly across the track with extended improvised melodies that still manage to act as lead lines. To be sure, this novel set of sounds ignites a feeling of discovery akin to those early moments in our lives that got us hooked on music in the first place; we just need to learn to live with the bittersweet reality that these near-approximations are the only version of this feeling that we will ever experience again. -Michael