Equestrian: Better Posture

Equestrian’s debut album, Better Posture, is vexing. On the one hand, the band’s got the talent. They have an advanced understanding of pop impetus. They create building, layered music. Their sound is never obnoxious, and it’s set wide from pretentious. Better Posture’s songs are charmingly flawed in the way a thrift store t-shirt is: Comfortable, worn in, and threadbare. On the other hand, this is the album’s greatest flaw. It is undeniably threadbare. The album is less than twenty minutes long, and one of those (precious) minutes is comprised of two instrumentals.

It couldn’t be said that the band is aiming for a Guided By Voices-type brevity. The albums closing song, the bitcrushed waltz “Leave Me for Dead,” is more than five minutes long. The opening song, “Died in a Dream” is more than four minutes long. Sandwiched in between are some very brief songs, but the band more effectively pulls off the slow-churning crest of cathartic pop better than the brief expression of a static idea. That’s not to say the band fails at its brief songs. “Lights That Surround You” manages to cobble together in its 2:24 satisfyingly layered vocals, horn parts, twinkling guitar, and Simon/Garfunkle-esque acoustic breakdowns. The song’s simplistic lyrics belie its thoughtful, articulate sonic construction. On the “Sleep and Dark and Industry,” the band hangs a tearing story onto a hook of handclapping, bootstomping, spoon-clapping percussion. But the song is essentially over at a minute and a half. The final forty-five seconds is just some echoey loop pedal feedback.

The title of Better Posture leads you to consider whether it’s the work of a band looking to improve, or one that already has. Are they slouching? Do they know they need some better posture? Or is this it? Is this the actual, better posture? It is vexing. This is an album that reifies the old marketing advice, ‘Keep them wanting more.’ I want more! More, more, more! Ultimately, this album is kind of disappointing because the six proper songs on it are really, really good. Equestrian is a very talented band, but this is not the product of a band that’s ‘quite there, yet.’ The two albums that I listen to the most are Wire’s Pink Flag and Nas’ Illmatic. Neither of those albums is more than forty minutes long. I believe thirty-five to forty minutes is the Platonic ideal of album length. Most artists need to trim their albums to get there, but Equestrian has the opposite problem–they need to record more songs. And for a band so talented, it might not be a bad problem to have.