Theres no telling how many lives were altered, and eardrums tainted, by the Houston black-metal squadron known as deadhorse. Even for those who never got to see them live (like yours truly), the foursomes patented horsecore pitbull thrash flecked with country, Texana, dark humor and a suitably perverted point of view seeped into suburban high schools like ours via the bands iconic cattle-skull Farm Road 666 T-shirts, plus the show reviews and other accounts of horseplay in the Public News we religiously picked up every week at the Baybrook Mall Sound Warehouse. Those stories made the Axiom and other favored horse haunts sound like some sort of subterranean Oz, a never-never land of strobe lights and sweat, a feeling that only intensified once we got a little older and finally got a taste of deadhorses recorded output like the LPs Peaceful Death & Pretty Flowers and Horsecore: An Unrelated Story Thats Time Consuming. (Some of the horses tale will be told in next years scene doc When We Ruled H-Town.) So when rumors of a reunion started swirling around back in June, our excitement approached the level of agitation found on a typical deadhorse track like the exceedingly brief French Fry. That feeling was tempered somewhat when we found out that original front man Michael Haaga remains estranged from the rest of the group most of whom are now making a similar brand of noise as Pasadena Napalm Division and would not be participating, but the evidence at the Deadhorse Texas Facebook page is enough to predict that Saturdays warmup gig for Austins Fun Fun Fun Fest next month will be one of the most chiropractically precarious shows youll see all year. Brace yourselves.
This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2011.
