"My Love EP" by Million Horses is building excellent atmospheres with just the instrumentals. So many layers and things happening over the stereo field. Mysterious, ambivalent, relaxing yet slightly dreadful, like walking alone in the deep woods while feeling like you're being watched. An uncovered well or the dark doorway of an abandoned bunker might hide something with yet unknown intentions. Even if benevolent, you want to leave that particular spot in the woods. When coming home, you still think about it and will recall it even decades later. One wrong turn and all goes awry, like the dream you're in could at any time turn into a nightmare.
I'm not quite sure what to think about the vocals. In a way, they are clashing with the image painted by the instrumentals, but are also adding to it. To some, I can imagine them feeling ethereal or soothing or maybe even dreamy, while to others they might instead feel creepy or edgy or even nightmarish (off-tune and angst-ridden). That duality may very well match the duality of the instrumentals. The lyrics come off as genuine, albeit a bit naïve at times (especially in the occasional rhyming). An eloge for including written lyrics.
The EP being called "My Love" suggests a story about love, but I'm not clear about the intentions of the ones involved. Surface and subtext seem to say different things. It's that duality again. I'm going to go with this being deliberate. I can after all not help but being a little intrigued by the ambiguity. It's probably time to stop overthinking things as I'm starting to see that duality everywhere now:
My love is so real \\ That my love seems fake
Great transitions between tracks, which also makes me treat this more as a whole rather than a sum. After a short intro, the EP starts with a highly ambient 11 minutes (half instrumental, half vocal), slow and kind of depressing, and later ends with two more percussion-heavy tracks. The ending definitely feels more upbeat than the beginning. A few things of note in the details:
- The wordless prolonged choir effects (if that's what they are?), like the oohing and the aahing, in track #3, "Your Signals", adds perfectly to the over-all ambience.
- The use of a horn in Track #4 feels perfect as it reminds me of a foghorn even before reading the title, "Blindness". The percussion work, especially in the mid-part, is just the right amount of disruptive and (almost) worth a paragraph of its own.
- The last track, "Running", also has percussion, although this time it's quite stable and feels poppier and has the most positive vibe, although the lyrics kind of say something else. Slightly more emo-pop vibe than the otherwise "ambient dreamy shoegaze emo-rock" vibe of the others.
Weren't it for the vocals adding a layer of uncertainty, which I'm personally not fully on-board with, I would recommend this whole-heartedly for the instrumentals, which I think carry a lot of the weight of this EP.