All The Right Weaknesses, the sophomore album from the Norwich-based sextet Brown Horse, takes a giant leap from their debut, exuding a steely confidence forged on the road and a beefed-up muscular sound that encompasses slacker-rock, folk, and alt-country reflecting the input of the different songwriters in crafting this stupendous second coming.
There will be those who harp on Lucida Williams comparisons, but they’re not listening beyond their expectations, and if touchstones need to be cited, then you should look more in the direction of Neil Young, The Jayhawks, Black Crowes and even The J Geils Band. But really, this is best approached without a reference map as the band welds any influences into their own identity.
Written by guitarist Nyle Holihan with Emma Tovell on pedal steel and Rowan Braham on accordion, it opens with the chime and chug of Verna Bloom, a musical desert rose titled for the late actress, the drums and churning electric guitars putting their stamp on proceedings as Patrick Turner sings “Strange shapes by the road draped in cellophane/Drag me back to your old checked dress billowing in the rain/Service station coffee, well it reeks like sour milk/When you’re spinning to the ground it’s a little late to ask for help”, a song of loss (“As the hatchback came around and circled the cul-de-sac I could tell I was going home and you were never coming back”), with the haunting line “The sand beneath my feet felt just like the sand/On the beach where I had held your ashes in my hand”.
That desert soundscape persists with the slow-paced walking rhythm of Wisteria Vine which, written by Braham and dappled by Phoebe Troup’s banjo, deals in schooldays memories (“Bored half to death in assembly/I dreamed the classroom was empty/Hands on the coins in my pocket”) of a teenage friendship (“I would tell you half of everything/But I don’t have near enough time”) and its drifting apart (“I might’ve known/By the way you changed your tone/Three more bends and home/Friends I couldn’t tell”) with its farewells (“It was late but still light/When you said goodnight” and the intimation of bad news in “The phone it rang like a tremor” and the closing “Get, I’ll catch you yet/In your boat and row clear of mine”.
Nyle Holihan’s Corduroy Couch has a lighter feel to its driving bouncy pop urgency, Turner and Troup sharing the vocals and adding their guitars to his, the lyrics laden with memories (“We watched The Matrix on a corduroy couch/The smell of the ocean was drying on your skin/Your big retriever’s name was Hank”) as it sketches a relationship eroding in “lives that have no second act” (“Every tide takes a little more of the shore/I used to wanna stick around forever/But I don’t want to anymore… In the morning/You left me a poem/I was mowing the lawn”).
They take the pace down with Dog Rose, featuring guitar chimes, a circling keyboard drone and lap steel. Sustaining familial connections, it opens with “I gave your mother’s son-in-law a ride” and proceeds to unfold more images of things falling apart (“Forest decaying, the stench like wine…branches and dead leaves about your thighs… Cracks in the floor like a cell divides”) and transforming (“The distance between time is fortified/The reason the trees metamorphosize”).
Much of the material was born from extensive touring around their debut, and there’s a road weariness that informs several of the songs, most notably the title track with its Dylan/Band inflections as Turner sings, “count yourself lucky you’ve a sense of humour/When your life’s a joke come true/Be it high, low or lost on us, I’ve been beat down the beaten track” with its wry smile observation that “a comeback’s still a comeback/Even after the bell in the bar of the hotel” and the resigned acceptance of “I’ll take all the drinks/These tokens can afford/Cause then at least the music’s/Still making money for my landlord/There’s no clocking off I guess it takes forever, whatever you do/You can write on my tombstone/ ‘Business doing pleasure with you’”.
The J Geils reference comes with the Centrefold-echoes of the melodic hooks in Holy Smokes, writer Turner adding fiddle with Tovell on pedal steel and Braham squeezing accordion, a workers kickback against the drudge and exploitation (“Abandon all hope/Ye who enter here…you can’t find much when all your time is lying on the factory floor…you know I was thinking/We should organise/Our desire for living outweighs the sum of all their lies”).
Another Nyle song, with its niche Return Of The Jedi reference, Radio Free Bolinas (a pirate radio station founded in 1978 and shut down by the FCC, the slogan stickers appearing on the helmets of two Y-wing pilots), is also a nod to Bolinas, California, the city that inspired Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. Riding Holihan’s throbbing bass groove with Tovell’s pedal steel and Troupe’s banjo, it has lines like “In the space between hotel rooms/Inside there’s no weather/We live in comfort forever/With the recently dead/How can this town feel so different/And look exactly the same/Like the face of your mother/As you’re sweating through a fever dream” and “One day you’ll walk into the river/There will be flowers all around/Trout will dance in the ripples/Like fallen jewels/I’ll tell you all about it/When you’ve got some time to hear it/A moment pickled in sugar”. I confess they had me struggling to decipher, but the emotional punch was still potent.
Arguably their most Southern country feeling track, Tombland is another heavy with a mix of loss and hope (“The house has grown a little bit colder…You were telling me how living/Always struck you as kinda tough/But the fact of the matter is matter of fact/You do, like me, believe in love”) with suggestions of depression (“I heard those devils came back round/Just like you knew they would”) faced with defiance (“you said: They can’t burn me brother/I was born in a ring of fire”).
The song speaks of silvers, greens and blues and, Braham on piano, the image of silver recurs in Troup’s circling melodic folk-pop relationship-themed Curse (“I curse myself in silver and I curse myself in white/As the magpies took flight”), the lyrics both direct (“I wasn’t your best friend but I always listened well/Laying in the motel”) but again also resisting easy interpretation (“Shine on, Capricorn for me, and I’ll give up real soon/You see different stars to me, they’re nothing like the moon/Since I was a kid I’ve heard my answers in those tunes…You drank water on the prairie/You drank seldom in the bars/Didn’t care much for the ceiling/So you lay under the stars/ I wear something round my neck now/And it’s in the shape of you”).
Twang, jangle and pedal steel carry Tovell’s slow-paced sway Wipers, which, mentioning their tour bus The Mischief and opening with “Bill Callahan in the van/Cutting through the car park/Kids doing handstands on the bandstand”, returns to the idea of being lost in the fog of emotional depression (“Why d’you never talk?/Hey, shut the windscreen wipers off/It’s stopped raining”) as, watching hearse pass by amid images of decay and death (“Blistered silence seeping/Winter woollens scratching skin/Rusted old pavement grate/That pigeon’s still rotting in”), Turner encourages “Baby you gotta try and push through/Your pale eyes see better in the dark”.
Arranged for piano, banjo and fiddle, it ends with Far Off Places, another informed by a life on the road that balances the disorientation (“Gotta run but I can’t walk straight/ Nowhere to be but I’m running late …washed up stars are out too soon/Moonshine a little out of tune/Half of heaven’s coming undone”) with the sardonic (“I write jokes for the broken-hearted/ Everybody’s gotta have some fun… Tried to get rich, but here I am instead”) and the solace (“if I just close my eyes I could probably still walk home/‘Cos there’s wild music in wide open spaces/And I can talk to you even when I’m alone”).
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that our strength grows out of our weakness, and while the overall mood may be downcast, musically, lyrically and thematically, there’s a fire raging through the album that should see it easily featured on many year-end best-of lists.
All The Right Weaknesses (April 4th, 2025) Loose Music