Wilder Music

By Niall Mirza.

Death is a tricky muse. It can be melodramatic, overplayed, and yet, when done right, devastatingly honest. Heart Attack Man accept this challenge on ‘Joyride the Pale Horse’, screaming like hell through death in all its forms and manifestations. This record is their most self-aware, self-destructive, and self-reflective project yet.

Heart Attack Man is Adam Paduch, Eric Egan, and Ty Sickels.

Wanting to die, battling with grief, and learning how to stay alive. When writing about death, it’s important that you have a lot to say, and Heart Attack Man do. In songs such as ‘Quit While I’m Still Ahead’, dying feels far more metaphorical than being six feet under. With the record’s title serving as a biblical allusion to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the band set out figurative foundations of flirting with death as an overarching theme. This album thoroughly excels in this regard. Lyrically, its highlights hinge on the manifestation of intrusive thoughts and self-reflection, going deeper than their previous albums in terms of personal introspection. And they only mention firearms in one song this time, crazy stuff. It makes you wonder whether Egan even wrote this album. Or did they kill him and replace him with a hologram?

Heart Attack Man take a heavier route for this project, avoiding a major pitfall that can be found with hardcore music. Typically found in, ironically, death metal projects, an album can sometimes feel like a thirty-minute-long panic attack. That intensity can be powerful, but Joyride the Pale Horse aims for more. It evokes death without becoming one-note; it takes existential dread and moves it around, sharing its weight. The project never stays in one place.

While the band are great at heavier music, with a different approach to hardcore on this project than their Thoughtz & Prayerz EP, they’ve also always shone on the softer, more downbeat tracks. So, it was in part disappointing to see this album was missing its ‘The Choking Game’ or ‘God Called Off Today’, staple solemn downbeat songs from their previous albums. Yet, you soon realise that aspects of what makes these songs great are present in virtually every single song on Joyride The Pale Horse. For the first real time, the band consistently merges the heavier side with the softer side, emulating the progression of their entire previous albums within and across individual songs. The opposite is also true, with the more downbeat ‘I’ll See You There’ showcasing a greater edge than their previous tunes in the same style, intuitively melding the two together in a new way for the band.

I’ll admit, though, the short song lengths gave me pause. During my first listen, I felt like the tracks weren’t given enough room to breathe. However, they feel like a tribute to the more melodic, fast-paced hardcore of Egan’s early band days. While this is a subgenre I’m not naturally drawn to, it’s hard to say that the lengths don’t fit the songs well. Ultimately, each track is doing so much within its short runtime that it feels like a trivial thing to complain about. And if you still want more when you’re done, you can just loop them all twice. It would be interesting to imagine some of the tracks with fully fleshed-out guitar solos, like in ‘The Gallows’, giving Sickels more time to shine from behind the vocals and giving Egan more time for dance breaks during live shows. However, this risks reducing the hardcore punching moments. These moments are where Paduch, the band’s drummer, truly shines – notably on ‘Can’t Slow Down’. To me, it feels like a trade-off, and I think the band made the right choices despite my personal initial reservations.

Another review of this album that said it fails to keep its momentum, because it gets less vicious from the first to the last track. But we shouldn’t necessarily measure momentum by volume or speed. If it ‘kept its momentum’ in the way that the review suggests, the structure of the album would deflate. It wouldn’t take you anywhere. ‘I’ll See You There’ and ‘The Gallows’ act as valleys before the abrasive mountain that is ‘Quit While I’m Still Ahead’. Without them, the record would lose its emotional core and its versatility, two things that make it an incredible project.

For an album that starts with its encore, its journey is clear. Non-linear, but clear. It feels, in the least cliché way possible, like a rollercoaster. A rollercoaster wouldn’t be allowed to run if it threw you sucker-punches the whole time. Upon reaching the final track, a chopped Freak of Nature era song, you’re already getting over that nausea, ready to ride the next one.