The opening line of 'A Horse Is Not A Home' does a better job of describing how I feel about this song than I ever could: 'Oh God! I think I'm dying!'
A Horse Is Not A Home is a track off of Miike Snow's self titled debut album released back in May of this year. Miike Snow, as iTunes point out, is not in fact one bland artist but three bland artists: singer/song writer Andew Wyatt and production duo Bloodshy & Avant, less pretentiously known as Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg (okay, just as pretentiously known as).
The band are an electro pop group that have been compared by The Guardian's Paul Lester to A-Ha, and I'm not entirely sure if that's supposed to be a good thing or not. Sort of like being told you have the charisma of William Shatner.
The track is average dance fair with a basic thud-thud-thud club beat; the drums suddenly falling over every so often, presumably out of boredom. Ghostly pianos echo across the majority of this void of a song eventually giving way to ugly rave synths until Bloodyshy & Avant seem to agree that this was just making things worse and very quickly bring the piano back. Frankly, I expect a hell of a lot better from the Swedish production duo who have churned out hits for a smorgasbord of other artists including Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears.
But while the music is simply dismissively uninteresting the lyrics are God awful. They sound like one of the worst attempts by a Euro-Pop band to craft earnestly-overly-emotional-English-is-my-second-language lyrics ever. It's almost impossible to know where to begin. One of my personal favourites is: 'Uninvited to the play / where language doesn't hurt / with nothing on my shirt.'
...What?
The song's whole lyrical feel, particularly the choruses titular line 'A Horse Is Not A Home,' feels like they played a game of song writing madlibs:
Christian Karlsson: "A noun is not a home?"
Andrew Wyatt: "How about horse?"
Pontus Winberg: "Haha, yeeeah! Sounds like a hit!"
Christian Karlsson: "Fuck yeah, that's hi-lar-ious! Hey, somebody pass me our respect for the music buying public, I want to rape it some more."
It's the only way to explain away lines like 'With a golden hand by your fortress side / but without magic.' Initially I assumed the group song writer, Andrew Wyatt, must have also been a Swedish native like his production duty counterparts, explaining away the bizarrely Eurovision-esque lyrics. But he's an American.
So yes Miike Snow, I think we are dying. A slow, boring, pointless, vapid, disgusting, insultingly bad death.
-Dashiell 'My Fortress Side Has This Much Magic' Asher
Image courtesy of Downtown Records / RCRD LBL
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