26th August 2022
Christopher Nosnibor
How did this happen? How?? I mean, it’s no bad thing – quite the opposite, in fact – but somehow, a joke band so jokey as so seem almost mythological has broken through, not just on the local scene, but nationally and with songs being played on high-profile radio stations like BBC introducing and even 6Music. They’re a way off beating Shed 7 as York’s most renowned act, but they really are gunning hard for national status right now, following the success of Oh I Don’t Know, Just Horse Stuff, I Guess and now Please Note Intentional Misspelling of Horse.
To look at the covers of early Petrol Hoers albums – or indeed, alboms – is likely enough to deter most sane people – cartoon horses with toilet-wall scrawled enormophalluses provide the housing for messy combinations of hardcore techno and grindcore, the most improbably of hybrids imaginable rendered cheaply and with not only a knowing, but a gleeful lack of sophistication.
So what happened? Not much, really, at least on the face of things. The material is still very much centred around shameful horse puns and so on, and their sound is still a weird mash-up of techno and industrial metal, kinda like Revolting Cocks gone even wronger than on recent tours. The cover art’s been toned down a bit (Horse Stuff featured Danny elegantly draped in a dressing gown in his horse head mask), and some hard touring alongside mates Horse Bastard turned the nation on to all things equine seems to be about the summary of the turn in favour for the act whose most renowned merch is a T-shirt that was born out of a hilarious misunderstanding with the printers, bearing the slogan ‘“PETROL HOERS” IN COMIC SANS CENTRE FRONT BIG AS YOU CAN TA’.
Danny Buckley isn’t daft, and the whole HOERS project is very much an escape for him – but he does it all so well. From the relentless, eye-bleeding block caps posts on social media to the tie-dye T-shirts and pants, HOERS are the full package, so to speak.
Lead single, ‘Captain Me Space Daddy’ has already had some radio play, which is an incredible achievement, considering that it’s an aggressive shouty racket that switches from grating aggrotech to some kind of cheesy Eurovision pop shanty meets early Wax Trax! that’s 100% what the fuck.
It’s exemplary of the album as a whole: fast and frantic – Ali G rapping over chiptune Cossack disco in a head-on collision with full-on raging metal abrasion with raw-throated hollering vocals. It is utterly absurd, and even knowing what to expect, you still find yourself dazed by the audacity of this insane hybrid that singlehandedly knells the death toll for postmodernism, because now, it really has all been done. The thing is – and make no mistake, it’s absolutely genius – even if you absolutely hate it, it’s impossible to deny the audacity and to admire it. ‘Honk if You Like Donk’ is pretty much self-explanatory, while ‘You Can Give Horse a Buckfast’ is a balls-out rager that slips into some kind of lederhosen-slapping ho(rs)edown. ‘You can give a horse a Buckfast / but you’ll never see me drink’, snarls the tee-total Hoers. Wait, he does this shit sober? Oh yes.
It kicks off – and boy, it kicks off – with the Hi-NRG happy horsecore / doom-grind crossover of ‘It’s Just a Mask’, and one feels for all the horseplay, there’s something quite insightful and honest about this. ‘I Would Die for Mr Crunchy’ finds The Hoers spitting vitriol about politicians and the monarchy, and again illustrates that for all the frippery and puerile puns, there is some genuine substance here, and Hoers are by no means completely crass and two-dimensional.
Closer ‘Biblically Accurate Horse’ is a pumping techno tune that invites worthy comparisons to PIG and KMFDM. It’s a bangin’ finish to a bangin’ album, and yes, yes, it really does bang all the way. It’s completely barmy, and that’s precisely why it’s brilliant.
AA
Aural Aggravation 