I’m incredibly proud to present you the newest album by PALE HORSEMAN, a sludge metal band from Chicago! “Mourn The Black Lotus” is their second offering that was recorded earlier this year and mixed and mastered at Comatose Studio by Dennis Pleckham, also an axe-man for the mighty doom purveyors BONGRIPPER. The new record contains a remix of “Fork in the Road”, a track out of the first self-titled PALE HORSEMAN record, done by none other than Justin Broadrick (GODFLESH, JESU). Proudly following in the footsteps of their debut album, the new material punishes with impressive sonic results. So here they arer – scroll down to play the full album, check out the band’s exclusive commentary and be the judge!
Pre-orders for the Digipack CD version of “Mourn The Black Lotus” can be placed HERE and digital copies of the record will be available via all digital music outlets on July 7th 2014.
On Justin Broadrick collaboration:
“As I’m sure you can tell by my name, I am a GODFLESH super fan. All the members of Pale Horseman are big fans of GODFLESH, in fact. It is the one metal band that united us all and continues to influence and inspire us. I had actually communicated with him once before concerning the song lyrics to the GODFLESH song, “Mothra.” At the time, Pale Horseman was seriously considering doing a cover of the song, and all the lyrics I could find online did not seem right to me. So, I said to myself, “Why not go right to the source?” To my surprise and delight, he responded, gave me correct lyrics, and said “Have fun covering the song.” I was very impressed that Justin Broadrick would talk the time to help a complete stranger like that!
So, I kept seeing Justin doing all these remixes for seemingly random bands of varying genres and sub genres, with no rhyme or reason as to which bands he would work with. One day I decided to ask him how he chooses who he works with, thinking that big record label executives must be involved or some other b.s.
Well, sure as shit, he responds again, basically saying he would be willing to work with us! It took a while to nail down due to his numerous projects and busy schedule, but six months later we had that amazing remix of our song 100% complete. It was all done through e-mail. We had our studio engineer, Dennis (Pleckham), send him all the raw studio files of all the tracks for the song, and six months later it was done.
Two especially interesting facts about that whole deal are that we let Justin choose which one of our songs he wanted to remix; he himself chose the one song he felt he could work with the easiest, and also that we gave him absolutely no ideas or input as to which direction he should take it, other that the fact that I made it clear we are all huge GODFLESH fans! He made our song sound just like classic GODFLESH and we couldn’t be happier with the end result! The remix, the mix, and the mastering are all immaculate, in our opinion; Pale Horseman touched by the hand of God, as far as we’re concerned!”
On working with Dennis Pleckham:
“Dennis is a true gentleman and a good friend. He’s actually been a bit of a mentor for us and has given us some sound advice from his experiences with BONGRIPPER over the years. We actually played a show with BONGRIPPER many years ago when they were still fairly new, in the form of our previous band together, COULDRON. Three members of PALE HORSEMAN are ex-members of COULDRON.”
Anyway, this time around, Dennis was definitely more involved in every way. He did a tiny bit of producing on this album which he didn’t do whatsoever for the debut. It was exciting for us to see him get a little more into it this time, and hopefully this aspect will continue to grow and progress even more with time as we record more albums with him. We consider him to be somewhat of a genius, and also a mentor in many aspects of music, both artistically and business-wise. We plan on always going to Dennis to do our albums. He’s a really good fit with our personality as a band, as individuals, and as artists.”
On “Mourn The Black Lotus”:
“We started writing the songs that would become our sophomore release, “Mourn The Black Lotus” immediately after our debut was recorded.”Conquistador” was the first song to be completed which was back in about April of 2013, and the others soon followed in line. We booked studio time with Dennis right at the end of 2013, into the beginning of 2014. Eric and I write all the music and lyrics, and Rich and Chris add the thunder to make the songs heavy and whole.
The recording process itself only took about one full day per instrument and vocal, and then about a full day of touch ups, so about 7 days total, weekends only, which equated to about 6 weeks. The mixing took a little longer. We really wanted this album to outdo our debut, so we took our time and scrutinized the whole thing several times over.
That’s not to say we didn’t leave any imperfections or mistakes in there, because there are several throughout the album, which were left in intentionally of course. Many were corrected and some were not. It’s a fine line we tried to walk on this album between sounding good and sounding overly produced. Hopefully we succeeded!
The album is called “Mourn The Black Lotus” after the song “Black Lotus” which was an experimental song for us. Musically, it is unlike any other song we have done before, and of course, it morphed into something slightly different from my original idea when I was first writing the riffs. For one thing, it has only two riffs! Most of our other songs from both albums have at least four or five riffs.
The album doesn’t really have a specific concept other than our usual apocalyptic, supernatural, and misanthropic themes we seem to stick to in all our music thus far. The song “Black Lotus” is actually about the poaching and extinction of the West African Black Rhinoceros, which was officially declared extinct last November (2013) which was right around the time I started writing the song. The artwork on the album also follows this common theme, our disgust for the horrible people responsible, and the downfall of this magnificent, majestic beast.
Other song themes include the gift or in this case, the curse of clairvoyance, the Moth man legend and prophecies of Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the late 1960s, grudgery, the apocalypse, street justice, and the betrayal and murder of the Aztec King Moctezuma II, and subsequent fall of the Aztec empire at the hands of the Spanish Conquistadores in the early 1500s.
On Pale Horsman evolution:
“It’s difficult for me to put into words how our sound has evolved since the first album. It’s always been difficult for myself and for the rest of the band to analyze our sound. We definitely know what we’re not and we know how we want to sound, but we can’t really pinpoint what exactly we are! I think there’s a definite difference between the two albums. Guess I could say that these songs are a little more mature sounding, for lack of a better term.
One thing possibly worth noting is that with the first album, four of the songs were written with our previous drummer, before Chris was even in the band, so in reality he was learning half of the album which was written and composed in someone else’s drumming style. The overall feel would have most likely been similar had Chris been there from the start, but definitely different nonetheless.
Furthermore, two of the songs were written before I was even in the band, so I think this album is a better representation of who Pale Horseman is today, as a complete and cohesive unit.
We already have two new songs written for our future third release, and I personally am predicting it will be our best album yet. We all feel like we are currently writing the best material of our lives and that the best is yet to come!”
