Band:	Horseburner
Album:	Voice Of Storms
Style:	Stoner metal
Release date:	June 2024
A review by:	musclassia

01. Summer’s Bride
02. The Gift
03. Heaven’s Eye
04. The Fawn
05. Hidden Bridges
06. Palisades
07. Diana
08. Silver Arrows
09. Widow (The Hunt & The Prize)

“Stoner metal. Sludge. Doom. Call it what you will” – so say Horseburner about their music, and it’s fair enough; we (and especially I) can get bogged down in labels. One extra genre I’ll throw into the ring, however, is prog, and when it’s me talking about a proggy stoner/sludge metal album, it shouldn’t be surprising that another thing that I call it is ‘damn good’.

Voice Of Storms is the West Virginia foursome’s fourth album, coming a whole five years after The Thief. There’s been quite a few exciting and well-crafted albums released within this niche since The Thief came out, and Voice Of Storms slots in very nicely alongside them. Comparisons to mid-era Mastodon, and to a lesser extent Baroness, are inevitable and merited, given the southern rock twang to the lively and exhilarating guitar playing, as well as the overlap in tone between Horseburner’s vocalists and the likes to Troy Sanders and John Baizley. Still, this well of inspiration is a deep one, and Voice Of Storms is another surge of black gold.

On the sludge intensity spectrum, Horseburner lean towards the lighter end; there are heavy tracks here (particularly “Palisades”), and even the cleaner songs feature some yells and slightly harsher roars, but melody is definitely given a high level of priority. An early track that demonstrates this is “Heaven’s Eye”; the uplifting vocal melodicism, catchy grooves and fun guitar licks, and also the crunchier lower-end riffs, remind me a lot of Terminus and their 2021 album The Silent Bell Toll. An even lighter sound can be heard on “The Fawn”, which opens in fully acoustic fashion and features some serene vocal harmonies.

Still, Horseburner are a heavy band, and the first ‘proper’ track on the album, “The Gift”, makes this evident early on. There’s a brutish heaviness to earlier riffs in the song, and the mix of this with some light-speed strumming patterns later on actually takes my mind to last year’s The Gorge album, albeit without quite as much intensity or complexity. As namedropped in the previous paragraph, though, “Palisades” is the song that feels heaviest here; it also feels the most hectic, as the verses are loaded with rapid-fire guitar noodling firmly reminiscent of Brent Hinds’ guitar style. I’m a big fan of this album, and this review is going to be full of positives, but if there’s any one moment on Voice Of Storms that doesn’t quite gel with me, the chorus of “Palisades” for some reason feels a tad underwhelming.

Outside of that, there’s little to complain about and plenty to enjoy, particularly on the album’s proggier cuts, of which there’s three that run past the 7-minute mark. “Hidden Bridges” is the first of these on the tracklist, and its generally uplifting and radiant melodic feel takes it right into recent Elder territory with great success. “Diana” goes in a heavier direction, but is a joyful celebration of guitar harmonies, and the epic hooks in the closing stages make for a great ending. Last but not least comes 9-minute closer “Widow (The Hunt & The Prize)”, a sprawling epic that features some of the most emphatically grand riffs on the album (the one that kicks in around the 3-minute mark is a particular delight), as well as brooding moments that surprisingly put images of Unto The Locust-era Machine Head in my brain, but it also has prolonged sequences of boisterous jamming and soloing that make for great entertainment.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what their style is called, Horseburner’s latest album slots right into a very particular sonic niche that I am repeatedly finding to be irresistible when written well, and Voice Of Storms largely nails whatever it sets its mind to.