The album title reads like a “Mellow Gold”-era Beck lyric. The cover art is a psychedelic children’s drawing depicting a mystic midnight menagerie (notably horse-less) which seems to be ruled by a floating, buck-toothed, suboxone-animated magenta gumdrop. It’s far out, but not dramatically unlike the space in which All The Pretty Horses played the first show on their record release tour in New York City last Friday night.

The room was tucked into the back of The Windjammer in Ridgewood, a
sailing-themed towny bar among the final frontier of $6 beer-and-shot specials in the five boroughs. There’s miscellaneous nautical décor nailed to the walls, a single pool table in the middle of the room, and about three lightbulbs in the entire joint. Everyone was dressed with the pomp of ill-fitting jeans and amorphous sweaters like a bunch of locals who just happened to swing by their local watering hole on the walk home, or
towards whatever’s next. Whether that was probably exactly the case at The
Windjammer is ultimately irrelevant (or maybe the point?). The real point is that this is a Hartford band and the music speaks for itself. If the musicians – especially frontman/composer/lyricist Austin Traver – had wanted or tried to insert themselves into the spotlight in front of the music, it wouldn’t have worked. No one did that. The band was a vehicle for a solid album more than a band on a stage, and it ruled. This album doesn’t need any help standing on its own.

“Frances,” the opening track, reads a little one-dimensional until the synth rips in during the final third of the song. Is it worth the wait? Depends on whether you’re in it for the long game. Unlike the bulk of albums dropped in 2024, The Year of Our Lords Big Oil and Unceasing Mental Masturbation, All the Pretty Horses’ latest release is made for listening from cover to cover. One song wafts effortlessly into the next without providing or feeling obligated to provide a distinct beginning or end, stop or start, not because the songs are repetitive or unmemorable, but because Horses has its own
sound and knows what that sound is, and this album is (praise god) not a series of singles Frankensteined together by a cohesive theme and ultra-earnest Scotch tape to the point of being uncool (sorry). This is an album. It’s an art piece that shines best as a capsule. Step back to look at it all at once like a large canvas – and resist any creeping discomfort at the feeling of “I really liked that track, what was it called? Oh, we’re onto another track already? I didn’t even notice.” Lean in.

As such, I feel like a dick for cutting it up with rock-critic dissection shears, but the star track here is “Sophie,” a heavy, droning drug anthem bookended by radio dialogue, fuzzy barely-there vocals, and minimal bass. Stuff your hands in your pockets and take a walk with this one. It’s an old formula, but it doesn’t need upgrading because it works. Incidentally, the opener is also a person’s name, “Frances,” but if they ever met in real life, Frances would be trying to win the gal while the gal is already busy writing her number down for Sophie – who didn’t ask for her number and doesn’t even want it, actually. After “Sophie” ends, the record immediately rips into an orchestral kazoo chorale (yes, really) before it’s right back to all that scrumptious sludgy beauty with “Hard Hill Road South,” made all the tastier thanks to the
unexpected Zappa-esque interlude. That initial one-dimensionality was on-ramping. The equal mixing of instrumental and vocal in the tracks that follow makes the lyrics blur, melding into a comfortingly dissonant ode to the ennui of modernity and its deathless white noise.

If you’re neither happy nor sad – indeed, if you’ve been feeling “a little off” for the past five years or better – “Witches Up No Mountain, Switches Down No Valley” might be the album for you. You don’t have to be in a particular mood for this one to hit. Or, perhaps more accurately, if you point to the “bored” face on the Emotional Vocabulary Chart hanging on the wall in your analyst’s office (that’ll be $60), drop those shoulders. This album has arrived right on time to rub its grungy little fingers into your brain, not for that long-awaited lobotomy but for a massage. Take a break, and maybe even take that aforementioned walk. Chances are that analyst is on your case to take more walks already (and to get your grungy fingers off of her Emotional Vocabulary Chart, thank you very much). The least you can do is circle the block just to prove it won’t help. And, at 27 minutes from start to finish, All the Pretty Horses’ extended anthem will only get you around the block once or twice anyway.

You can listen to Witches Up No Mountain Switches Down No Valley here.

Written by Autumn Swiers