After his turn at screwball grindcore metal under the alias of Chopping Mall, Milwaukee’s Keith D. returns to the pummeling majesty of the band for which he’s best known, Arctic Sleep. The one-man band follows up 2019’s critically lauded extended eulogy for D.’s pet cat that passed on, Kindred Spirits, with a tie-in to an animal of another sort. By the Horns offers two songs to complement Markisan Naso’s comic book series of the same name about a woman bent on making unicorns extinct as revenge for one of its kind killing her husband. Horns’ fantastical premise (there’s a communicative floating eyeball in its storyline, too) gives D. grist to unleash the kind of brutal doom metal beauty that picks up where Spirits left off. Here, though, it’s even more orchestrated and punnishingly lush than before.
If ever Horns makes it to animated form, it should prove intriguing as to how the visual element and Arctic Sleep's music interact. The By the Horns soundtrack is also the first release on Naso’s Skull Fracture Records, and if this tie-in with his main work is any indication of what is to come, the label should be a source for more compelling music.
