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Horse Blanket

  • self-released

The Seattle indie rock band’s final record is a great parting gift, one with generous portions of wit, melancholy, and even one long guitar solo.

If dreary Seattle indie rock had poet laureates, Posse would handily claim the title. Since 2010, across two previous albums, the trio chronicled the banality and disappointments of life in their Northwest city with wit and sadness and hilarity. The sound they crafted to accompany their stories of bad dates at terrible Seattle rap shows (“A bald white guy/With a mumu onstage” one lyric went) and workplace frustration was beautifully spartan; just two guitars and a drum chugging along in a haze. Horse Blanket is the band’s final record, an EP of six songs about the things they know best: “boredom and loss, miscommunication and regret.”

On opener “Dream Sequence,” vocalist Sacha Maxim gently shoves a listener into Posse’s disaffected, overcast world: “I was sick/I was tired/I was standing in the rain” she sings with a frown. The lyric is without frills or metaphor. Instead, Posse find poetry in blunt and dead-simple observations. This reflects in their arrangements, which are without ornamentation or glitz, just Maxim and Paul Wittmann-Todd’s depressive guitar strums accompanied by Jon Salzman’s quiet drumming.

While their sound could almost be described as rudimentary, it’s never boring. The deliberate nature of their music, the almost shuffling sleepwalking stupor of their voices and each instrument trudging forward, create a sense of pace and place that is so real it can be hallucinatory. Like on “Shiver” when Wittmann-Todd slurs, “I feel cold/Or maybe something like that,” the frigid trickle of guitar notes perfectly mimics the loneliness of his line. Something the band does so amazingly well, especially on songs like “Shiver,” is recreate an entire universe of subtle, painful interactions, “funny little rituals,” and personal landmarks. On “Shiver“ Wittmann-Todd takes you through a detailed tour of a break-up that travels between cold beaches and the interiors of shitty Volvos. The pain is self-lacerating: “I told myself I’d differ, but I never really change,” he sings.

That is not to say the band operates on the same mopey note. On “Keep Me Awake,” they have some fun, briefly donning the costume of a honky-tonk band. The grooviness of Sacha Maxim’s bass and the rattlesnake twang of Whittman-Todd’s guitar, for a moment, reinvent them as the coolest country rock act in the Pacific Northwest. And there is, of course, some fireworks to celebrate the end of things on the 12-minute title-track. It is the best song the band has ever written, a colossal, slacker-rock epic. In a 2014 interview, Wittmann-Todd said he once saw Carrie Brownstein rip a 40-minute guitar solo, and wished he could once do the same. On “Horse Blanket” he pretty much does that, letting loose a distorted, headbanging shredder.

But the song is a lot more than a rare show of pyrotechnics—it’s a duet between Maxim and Wittmann-Todd, with some their most gorgeous writing—spare and cutting and surreal. At one point Paul sings of “rolling out of bed” and Maxim answers, dreamily that this waking world is littered by “all the garbage floating through your mind.” They call it quits lazily and gracefully. The final track, “Trapped,” is an artful, slow-moving song about feeling unrooted and unsure. It ends with an honest couplet: “Have I given something away/And I just don’t know it?” It’s hard to tally the tangible output of any band, but Posse leaves us with this final thought—they may not know what exactly they gave, but it stays with us.

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