Posts Tagged ‘Petrol Hoers’

Petrol Hoers – Please Note Intentional Misspelling of Horse

Posted: 15 August 2022 in Albums
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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.

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Petrol Hoers announces UK tour

Posted: 22 March 2022 in Previews and Editorial
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Digital Horsecore pioneer Petrol Hoers is kicking off this year’s gig schedule with a UK tour in April, alongside techno punks Petrol Bastard and antisocial rock three-piece The Ducks.

Starting in Blackpool on April 7th, the tour will run for 11 days, finishing with an early evening show in Brighton on April 17th.

Part man, part horse, part hallucinatory nightmare; Petrol Hoers is galloping out of the strangest corner of the Yorkshire music scene with a unique blend of hardcore punk, hard drum+bass and surreal comedy.

The equine entertainer has built a cult following through his online antics and energetic live shows which has led to national radio airplay, festival appearances and being described by music industry legend and BBC Radio 6 presenter Tom Robinson as “…one of the oddest and most original artists it’s ever been my pleasure to come across in the last 15 years of BBC Introducing.”

The most recent Petrol Hoers album Oh I Don’t Know, Just Horse Stuff, I Guess is available to listen and download via Bandcamp. 

You can catch Petrol Hoers at the following dates:

Thursday, April 7, 2022 – Scream & Shake, Blackpool

Friday, April 8, 2022 – Outpost, Liverpool

Saturday, April 9, 2022 – Aatma, Manchester

Sunday, April 10, 2022 – Santiago’s, Leeds

Monday, April 11, 2022 – Network, Sheffield

Tuesday, April 12, 2022 – The Chameleon, Nottingham

Wednesday, April 13, 2022 – Heartbreakers, Southampton

Thursday, April 14, 2022 – The Tin, Coventry

Friday, April 15, 2022 – The Lab, Northampton

Saturday, April 16, 2022 – Poco Loco, Chatham

Sunday, April 17, 2022 – Hope and Ruin, Brighton

Ticket and social links can be found at https://linktr.ee/Petrolhoers

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Petrol Hoers – Fulford Arms, York 17th January 2021

Posted: 17 January 2021 in Live
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Christopher Nosnibor

Recorded live at The Fulford Arms and streamed post-production as part of the venue’s seventh anniversary celebrations, Petrol Hoers’ performance was always going to be a must-see, and while there’s no way there can ever be a substitute for witnessing the spectacle first-hand, if ever a band was capable of conveying the eye-popping ‘wtf’ factor of their live shows via a recorded medium it was always going to be Hoers.

An overtly novelty band whose cover art – which invariably featured cartoon depictions of pumped-up horses with crudely-drawn phalluses – summed up the target level fairly accurately, it was a shock to none more than them for their last album Oh I Don’t Know, Just Horse Stuff, I Guess to be picked up by BBC 6Music. In the blink of a weeping third eye, they had a song about wanking being blasted out over the national airwaves.

The set opens with a massive slow-build, as crushing metal powerchords and epic synchs build up before powering into frenetic hardcore technothrash that rips the top off our skull.

‘Music! Is serious business!!’ yells the burly, hairy, horse-headed man wearing nothing else but tattoos and a pair of tight yellow trunks by way of an opening line. He’s right, of course, but how seriously can we take this? How seriously is he taking it? He – Dan Buckley, aka Danny Carnage is accompanied by a dude in a Mexican wrestling mask, accompanied by sheer vest and a pair of Y-fronts, and behind the synths and other electronic kit that generates the music, a third dude wearing a zebra mask.

‘I say petrol you say hoers!’ they chant shortly after. They’re masters of the slogan, and kings of the corn, and because of the masks, it’s impossible to tell if they’re actually managing to do this with straight faces or not. They clearly know that the whole thing is absurd, and are revelling in it, as they crank out a relentless barrage of HI-NRG pun-riven rave-metal insanity.

‘Help Me I Am in Hoers’ is another ear-bashing genre straddling grindcore/techno explosion, machine-gun drumming and wild (sampled / sequenced) guitar noise hammering in at a thousand miles an hour. ‘Only Fuels and Horses’ switches back and forth between bulbous trance and head-shredding industrial grind, while they list all the trials and tribulations of the physical limitations of equine existence om the stomper ‘#horseproblems’: ‘Have you ever tried to play a blastbeat with hooves?’ Well, have you?

Hoers live was always a brain-bending and mildly traumatic experience, but beamed into the homes of viewers in a blitzkreik of strobes and crazy fast-paced camera edits that are like early 90s TOTP on speed, this is something else. Credit to both the band and the Fulford Arms for really doing something different and something special here: it’s one thing to stream a live performance online, but entirely another to render it in such a fashion with such production – and to add to that, the sound production was absolutely fucking brilliant.

Having found online gigs something of a disappointment over the last ten months or so, it’s a joy to report that finally, I feel like I’ve attended a real event. And I’m going to have one hell of a hangover in the morning.

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Petrol Hoers – 21 Viral Hits

Posted: 6 May 2020 in Albums
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8th May 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

One thing’s for certain: lockdown is galvanising musicians to be innovative in ways that are truly unprecedented. Yes, I said it. The advent of the Internet may have revolutionised / fucked the music industry, and while in a bygone age, home taping didn’t kill music and neither did Napster at the turn of the millennium, iTunes and Spotify, in their attempt to create a new model that monetised downloading managed to inflict new levels of financial harm on the artists they were supposed to benefit.

Having recently found unexpected favour and airplay on BBC radio with a song about wanking lifted from last year’s Oh I Don’t Know, Just Horse Stuff, I Guess, York-based premium purveyors of relentless hoofcore had to do something while unable to don horse masks and dresses in public. And this is what they’ve done.

The Hoers’ press blurb explains it all best, and mostly in block caps:

‘21 Viral Hits is a collaboration between Petrol Hoers and vocalists across the country who answered his call. The initial pitch was pretty straightforward:

"DO YOU WRITE SONGS OR DO SHOUTY VOCALS? ARE YOU ANGRY ABOUT PEOPLE HOARDING BOG ROLL? DO YOU WANT TO CONTRIBUTE TO AN ALBUM OF RIFFS AND BLASTBEATS AND SHOUTING TO TRY AND RAISE SOME MONEY FOR CHARITY?

WE NEED PEOPLE TO WRITE LYRICS AND RECORD VOCALS FOR SOME SHORT SHOUTY SONGS PLEASE HMU IF YOU CAN HELP :3"

but soon resulted in a group of vocalists/lyricists putting pen to paper and then voice to microphone (or in some cases smartphone…) to lay down vocal parts while Hoers worked as a one-horse grind machine to write and record as many tracks as possible. Song subjects were agreed, production advice given and shrieking beast of an album was pieced together that was a triumph of remote collaboration.

With original cover art by Cat Bowen as the finishing touch, this album looks as massive as it sounds.’

And it’s true: it is absolutely fucking massive. And not just because it’s got 21 tracks on it, most of which are themed around this moment in time, as titles like ‘2 Metres’, ‘Lockdown’, ‘Great pasta famine of 2020AD’, ‘Wash Your Hands’, and ‘Selfish Cunts’ evidence.

Because it’s a Petrol Hoers album it’s brimming with high-octane, hundred-mile-an-hour bangers. But while previous excursions have increasingly favoured technoindustrial stylings, with thumping drum ‘n’ bass grooves and gnarly synths dominating the arrangements, 21 Viral Hits sees Dan Buckley and his myriad virtual collaborators return to the Hoers roots and goes full on grind / thrash metal, and it’s a filthy, furious guitar assault, and the longest song is two minutes in duration, on the nose.

‘Locusts’ rages at the panic-buying, trolley-filling, shelf-clearing fuckheads. ‘Insanitizer’ reels off a shopping list of unavailable items: ‘Pasta’s been taken / Bread is scarce’ is the core of the verse.

It’s rather less humorous and irony-filled than anything the Hoers have done before, but it’s an album of the times, and as a relentless, thunderous, metal racketacious capturing of this brief but terrifying moment in modern history, 21 Viral Hits fulfils its objective in delivering a gnarly, shouty, sonic battering that leaves you feeling bewildered, but no less bewildered than five minutes watching the news.

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Piiiisssss – Alan & His Parents

Posted: 2 March 2019 in Albums
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28th February 2019

Christopher Nosnibor

Piiiisssss’ third LP appeared by stealth, after a two-year hiatus, seemingly taking even its creator, the ever-prolific and unpredictable Dan Buckley, who has more projects, bands and pseudonyms than probably he can remember, by surprise, launching it via Facebook with the announcement ‘Lol I guess we have 3 albums now’. And as if to illustrate the point, that now stands at four just three days later, with the arrival of Enthusiast_ on 2nd March.

This five-tracker is a showcase of Buckley’s comparatively recent move into circuit-making, and if some of his kit doesn’t look especially pretty, then the sounds it makes are even more challenging at times. It’s front-loaded with the epics: ‘1’ is the first of the seemingly randomly-numbered / titled tracks, and is twelve-and-a-half minutes of oscillating loops.

‘II’, which clocks in at eleven-and-a-half minutes ventures into dark ambient territory, whispering and rumbling ominously and quietly, the distant whispers and moans creeping over a mid-range hum resembling a far-off herd of zombies in The Walking Dead. It’s unsettling, creepy… and then echoes of synth hum buzz louder, reverberating into the dead atmosphere. The drone rises to the fore and ultimately dominates everything, creating its own rhythm as the frequencies collide in a slow tidal wash. Sliding down the octaves, it transforms into a fear-chord organ throb that oozes unsettling vibes while a voice, roboticised and barely audible, winds down slowly in the background.

The third track is entitled ‘00000011’, and goes for the out-and-out eerie, with gloopy synths and bleeps and shooting star effects echoing into blackness to conjure an atmosphere that’s pure space-age horror. And if that genre doesn’t exist, then someone needs to make a movie to fit with this soundtrack.

‘Five’ is gnarly, loud, the fucked-up and desperate robotix vocal submerged in a woozy, warping wave of drone, rent with glitches, before it descends into a mess of scratching noise on the circuit-melting closer, ‘Confirmed Sixhavers’.

Piiiisssss marks quite a departure from many of Buckley’s myriad other musical outlet, not least of all his prolonged foray into playing covers revamped as bangin’ donk choons, or the industrial-disco grind of Petrol Hoers, and Alan & His Parents functions well as a standalone piece which showcases one of the many facets of a remarkably diffuse artist.

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The THING’s Circus of Horrors (featuring Little Death Machine) – The Fulford Arms, York, 20th August 2017

Posted: 21 August 2017 in Live
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Christopher Nosnibor

The soundcheck in progress while I’m ordering my first pint suggests we’re in for a loud night. Well, the Facebook event page did give fair warning. It’s a good job I’ve brought earplugs: the guy behind the bar points out that he’s already wearing his.

It’s 6:40pm on a Sunday evening in August. Outside, it’s still warm and the sun is out. Inside, it’s seriously dark, even with the curtains open and daylight filtering in. The THING – whose ‘Nightmares for Children’ streamed exclusively on Aural Aggravation back in April, begin their set with a dolorous bell chime and ominous, droning synths. The fear notes give way to a massage deluge of gut-grinding sludge: the guitar sounds like a bass, the bass sounds the bowels of Beelzebub after a phal. As they thunder through a continuous half-hour set, I’m reminded of Sleep, but the samples and synths which emerge through the murk gives an industrial edge to the doomy dronescape which reaches its climax by building through a single chord and floor to being battered at increasing speed before breaking into a tsunami of sludge.

The THING

The THING

Rotting Monarchs win band name of the night, no question. But starting fifteen minutes late in a tightly-packed schedule is not so cool, and they seem a bit disorganised and lacking in finesse. Still, their shouty, grindy punky racket brought together bits of NOFX with hints of Bomb Disneyland, which is no bad thing.

The place is suddenly a lot busier: Shrieking Violet have brought their mates. And they’re young. Many of them have short skirts and shiny new DMs. I’m here in my cracked £20 steel-toed Chelsea boots and beer-stained jacket. I’m not expecting much. Yes, they’re pure 80s, as if the singer’s hair and shirt didn’t give it away. The first track has hints of early Ultravox. But equally as the set progresses, I’m reminded of This Et Al minus the falsetto. They benefit from some hooky tunes propelled by some phenomenal, powerhouse percussion. ‘Avalanche’ is built around a steely, cyclical riff worthy of Killing Joke, and overall, it’s a strong set.

Shrieking Violet

Shrieking Violet

They may be playing as a three-piece sans bassist Dani, but SEEP AWAY still manage to bring eye-popping intensity and ear-shredding volume to proceedings. The eight-string guitar ensures the sound’s got density, and when paired with Dom Smith’s fierce drumming – his second set of the night having already pounded through The THING’s set – there’s plenty of sonic backdrop for Jay to do his manic thing. He’s a hell of a showman: that he’s wild and unpredictable and relentlessly in the crowd’s faces means you can’t take your eye off him for a second.

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SEEP AWAY

My opinions on novelty bands are no secret, and in the main, I think they suck. Petrol Hoers are a novelty bad so perverse, so fucked-up and plain wrong, that they’re an exception. Two blokes – two fat blokes – one wearing dungarees with no shirt, but a comedy horse’s head, the other wearing red Y-fronts, a fine mesh vest and a Mexican wrestling mask, stomp around hollering over backing tracks of blistering, uptempo industrial-strength bangin’ techno. In paper, it sounds both weird and shit in equal measure, but the audacity of these guys is as sheer as the pants guy’s top. The half dozen people who last the duration of their set absolutely fucking love it.

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Petrol Hoers

Little Death Machine take the stage ten minutes after their set was supposed to finish. Are they worth the wait? Absolutely. The London trio play in near-darkness, adding to the taut atmosphere which emanates from their technically precise and detailed compositions. On account of being scribbled in the dark (and not on account of the pints consumed over the course of the evening), my notes are a shade difficult to decipher, but in the moment I was taken by their rock / post-rock / hop-hop / soul rock hybrid. I also note by way of reference points Placebo, Oceansize, Nine Inch Nails, TesseracT, and some stuff I can’t make out from the scrawl.

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Little Death Machine

Did I really write ‘soul rock’? Yes, it appears so, and if that reads like an insult or criticism, it’s not: the moods that are deeply entwined within the songs, which are complex and progressive in their structures, are played with a sincerity and soulfulness that you feel. And that’s something no amount of technical ability or compositional dexterity can fake. It’s emotive, textured and resonant. And the perfect finish to an intense and varied night of live music.