Gus Eaglehorn, The Hornbrook LP - Quite Remarkable!

Album Review: Gus Eaglehorn, The Hornbook

Beautifully Bonkers

This is a remarkable album.  My gut response to it was to seek out where this guy and his band are playing.  With an album title that suggests witchy spells for aphrodisiacal purposes, Gus Eaglehorn has produced a collection of songs that promise a theatrical event, an American rock musical for the age of The Great Pushback on Humanity we are living through. 

With its quirky drama and humour, Eaglehorn demonstrates vital aspects of American art as old as the travelling freak shows of the Wild West and Victorian Britain.  Released on 31^st January, 2025,  The Hornbook wraps up all that is to be loved about the indie American music scene in a candy-coloured bag that invites you to pick out what we fancy, but I reckon, you’ll not want to share and just swallow it all in one go.  It’s witty and weird enough to be played repeatedly – and it rocks where it has to.  

 

Asking direct questions of the listener, or putting together deceptively simple rhyme, Eaglehorn’s voice holds a naïve charm, reminiscent of early Velvet Underground recordings, the rough-side, (if that is possible) of Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers, The Moldy Peaches.  The opening track, One Eyed Jack Parts I and II… builds tension, develops a sense of urgency and twists itself into a powerful knot, attempting to answer the one question Eaglehorn asks in the album's introduction, “What do you know about One Eyed Jack?”

 

Thyme, the album’s single, begins with a jangle of guitar, that flat drum beat, short, features some punchy lyrical rhymes, before Eaglehorn moves into a recital of the English folksong Scarborough Fair, (a tune that Bob Dylan worked around in the mid-1960s) before wandering off into his own world.  It is all a bit crazy, with a “Blast Off!” acting as a fulcrum for the transition to an energetic conclusion.

I am sitting here still trying to put into words what I feel as I hear Eaglehorn’s second album.  All I can say is that it is bonkers, but I love it.  The Itch is currently my favourite track. But overall, it is a complete album.  Folky in a Violent Femmes kind of way, energetic like Alan Vega’s work and just a bit odd at times, as it veers off the dusty trail verging into Meat Puppets territory. 

 

A Song With Arms and Legs, is the song that encapsulates the quirk of it all, with its nursery rhyme rhythms and texture, before we reach One Eyed Jack pt. III (Epilogue), which wraps up the whole shebang with a sudden silence.

 

Nice work, Gus Eaglehorn.  I am off to give his first album a hearing.

Chris Perry

31st January 2025