Review - Horsemen EP's, Then Comes Silence

 David Bowie’s Pin Ups…Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Through The Looking Glass… Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ Kicking Against the Pricks… to these legendary albums of cover versions can now be added Then Comes Silence’s Horsemen project, which cements their position as the pre-eminent twenty-first century goth/post-punk band.

A natural extension of the band’s lockdown covers, which did so much to keep alternative music fans’ spirits high during the pandemic, the Horsemen project is a suite of four EPs containing seventeen tracks in all, appropriately named after the biblical Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse.

The breadth of songs covered – from Gene Vincent’s Be Bop a Lula to She Past Away’s Katarsis via obscure tracks by the likes of The Shamen and Motörhead – hints at the Swedish band’s equally broad potential appeal beyond the narrow confines of the goth/post-punk scene, and also reveals a band well aware of its place in the alternative rock pantheon, paying its respects to those who have gone before and influenced them.

Although Then Comes Silence’s fan base has steadily increased over the course of their five critically-acclaimed albums to date, only the 2020 release, Machine, featured current guitarists Hugo Zombie and Mattias Ruejas Jonson, and the Horsemen project gave the band the opportunity to gel further as a project before undertaking their next LP.

Recorded in their own studio, the four EPs of the Horsemen side project are available in digital-only format, each featuring its own distinctive artwork and theme.

Pestilence

The first EP, Pestilence, opens with what band leader Alex Svenson has admitted was the most difficult to perfect of all the arrangements in the project, Echo and the Bunnymen’s The Killing Moon. The singer and bassist need not have worried, however, as Then Comes Silence’s version is more muscular, powerful and dramatic than the original, the combination of Svenson’s smooth, suave and sophisticated vocal and the Bunnymen’s epic chorus lending the track a James Bond-theme intensity. But this project is not just an A-Z of 1980’s post-punk royalty, as the next track amply demonstrates. It may have been written within the last five years, but Buzz Kull’s We Were Lovers has an earworm quality that effortlessly bridges four decades, particularly in Then Comes Silence’s capable hands. Hugo Zombie’s inventive reworking of John McGeoch’s genial playing on Siouxsie and the Banshees schizophrenic tale Christine will already be familiar to fans as the song was one of the band’s original lockdown covers, but the new version on Pestilence is both sharper and more focused. The final track on the first Horsemen EP, the Kinks’ Rainy Day In June, has been described by Svenson as summing up the whole project, the lyric an excellent metaphor for the lengthy global lockdown, and Then Comes Silence subtly update Ray Davies’ original without losing its wistfully melancholic vibe.

War

Of the four EP’s released under the Horsemen moniker, War is probably the least immediate, despite the presence of a very polished cover of Dance With Me, originally a minor hit in 1983 for goth supergroup The Lords of the New Church, a band which had an influence both musically and visually on Then Comes Silence. The band also takes on another of the genre’s sacred cows, The Sisters of Mercy’s Body Electric, drawing parallels in the introduction with the Swedes’ own biggest hit to date, Strangers, with Jonas Fransson’s crisp drumming a reminder of how TSOM might have sounded if Andrew Eldritch hadn’t hung up his sticks and invested in a drum machine. The other two tracks on War have the distinctively funky, offbeat angular vibe of early 1980’s new wave, with Fear of Glass (originally by fellow Swedes Cortex) and Grace Jones’ breathless Living My Life both maintaining the high tempo angst of this particular EP, bringing to mind the claustrophobic genius of vintage Talking Heads.

Famine

The third EP, Famine, is arguably the best of the four, not only because of the presence of an extra track but because on all five songs, the band manages to improve on the original, which Svenson acknowledges is the primary aim of any cover version. The minor key modulations in the chorus of Depeche Mode’s miserabilist anthem Shake The Disease have always been ripe for a gothic rock cover version, and TCS deliver the definitive account, replacing the original’s limp synths with light yet powerful layers of guitar. Dead Kennedy’s Moon Over Marin has a much simpler song structure, but Hugo’s skilful arrangement means that it doesn’t seem out of place, whilst retaining its message and momentum. The stunning cover of Be Bop A Lula is up next, distorted and reimagined in finest Cramps style, with Alex Svenson channelling his finest “goth Elvis” (to quote one YouTuber) for the unhinged vocal. From the ridiculous to the sublime for the final two tracks on Famine, superlative versions of two lesser known songs beloved of fans of the darkside, The Damned’s wah-wahed up goth’n’roll masterpiece Thrill Kill (from 2001’s Grave Disorder) and Where Do You Go?, a criminally ignored dark psych pop wonder from The Shamen’s Drop album (before they discovered techno). Svenson’s velvety baritone vocal is perfect for what is arguably the straightest and most reverential reworking of all the songs on the Horsemen project, and a track which (like Hallelujah and Perfect Day) deserves to finally reach a wider public thanks to a cover version.

Death

Like Famine, the final EP, Death, also starts with a guitar band reworking of a synth based classic, Belgian EBM legends Front 242’s Don’t Crash. The Horsemen version removes the jarring jerkiness of original, with the middle section sung by Aux Animaux’ Gözde Duzer. With the original lyric written by a woman (Valerie Steele), Svenson felt that it was only appropriate that a female vocal should feature on the new version. Current scene darlings She Past Away were originally well-known for only singing only in their native Turkish, but the Horsemen reworking of one of their best-known songs Katarsis features a stark vocal in English from Svenson, who worked on the new translation with Duzer (which was approved of by the original authors), and the new version again demonstrates the sheer quality of the music in the current scene, which may yet eclipse that of the original wave. Again. like Famine, Death ends with two sensational reworkings, beginning with Jimi Hendrix’s I Don’t Live Today (which is sadly unavailable in the US for copyright reasons). The stunning arrangement shows the wonderful synergy of the TCS twin guitarists to full effect, with the dark lyric highlighted by Svenson’s own stellar performance. Saving the best until last, Motörhead’s spine-chillingly experimental Nightmare/The Dreamtime (from the Battle Of The Somme-inspired album 1916) brings this extensive study in the art of the cover to an exquisitely epic and unexpected close, the slow power of the original harnessed to maximal effect in another sumptuous arrangement which enables modern studio technology to reveal additional layers of depth to one of Lemmy’s finest (if least well-known) songs.

In the art world, the Old Masters would refine their craft by experimenting with textures and techniques in reconstructing some of the greatest paintings by their predecessors. With the Horsemen project, Then Comes Silence have not only taken their own sound to another level by honing their craft in this way, they have redefined the future vision of the whole goth/post-punk genre, bringing together strands of the past and the present of the alternative musical genre from the rock’n’roll rebels of the 1950’s to the leading lights of today’s scene in a wholly successful project.

The Horsemen EP’s are digitally available via Metropolis Records (USA) and HaHa Fonogram (rest of the world). They can be found on all the usual digital platforms (Spotify etc) and streamed on the customary "try before you buy" basis on Bandcamp.