Sometimes a record comes along and it just stumps you. No matter how many listens you give it you just fail to get a handle on what the band is attempting, ending up perplexed every time you try to infiltrate the thought process. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ‘White Horse and the Unicorn’, an absolute schizoid beast of an album from the Brighton based Offcuts.
Now before we go any further, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In all honesty I don’t know if I actually like this record. On one listen I’ll decide I do, but on the next I’ll hate it with a passion. It’s almost bipolar inducing. Just the facts then. ‘White Horse and the Unicorn’ is at heart a hardcore record. Listen to ‘Broken Fingers’ and you can’t help but think of Gallows‘ debut record. There are beatdowns, ferocious guitars and real gritty sounds galore. Everything you’d expect from a D.I.Y. hXc band. But…
…and this is where it all gets a bit freaky. ‘Randoms’ starts off as though Tool were playing the song, all experimentally atmospheric and tweaked. ‘The Sad Unicorn’ puts me in mind of The Flaming Tsunamis (minus horns) with its off-centre dichotomy, once it gets past its Farmer Giles like ‘mythical’ kiddy-song introduction that is. ‘Brighton Strangler’ has some real ghost train like laughter, whilst ‘Foreign Motorway’ is a bass-heavy groove machine that ends in a truckload of distortion and noise. It’s all over the place.
Then there’re the lyrics. Ever heard a hardcore band singing about roller discos, forest animals and, you might have got this from the title, unicorns? Hardly your traditional fair that. It’s all delivered in an off-kilter manner which probably generates a lot of the uncertainty about this record. The vocals don’t always fit the sound, sometimes coming across as a piss-take Sex Pistols, but then sometimes seemingly a snug fit. It’s random at best. A little bit nasal, a lot ‘relaxed’ to the extent it’s barely singing at all. Some moments it’s perfect, then immediately it becomes ear-raping.
A 2.5/5 review is just about as close to sitting on the fence as possible, but then this record really doesn’t fall either side for me. Yet! I’d actually go so far as to say that there’s no point in reading a review of this record because no amount of words will sum up the bizarreness on offer here. Peculiar, beginning to end.
Alex