College Times

Issue date: 7/2/09 Section: Music

Media Credit: James Elkington

Swathed in a relaxing vibe throughout, Chicago collective The Horse's Ha's debut album is smoothed over by jazz elements and an even-keeled tenor that, at times, threaten to pull the comforters all the way over Of the Cathmawr Yards' head.

It's the very same straight-line approach that marks both the album's most marked successes and boring failures.

At moments, the cerebral marriage of improv jazz movements, weeping string-work and hyper-literate lyricism sees the record play timelessly, concurrently comfortable and challenging.

The thick baritone of Jim Elkington (The Zincs) tangles with the classically feminine register of Janet Bean (Freakwater) on wonderfully bizarre poem-pieces ("And row your rivers of temperance and toil/If you don't float in water you're bound for the soil" the couple muses on opener "Plumb"), certainly befitting the Dylan Thomas short story from which The Horse's Ha derive their namesake.

But the band's pace of choice - a slow, jazzy saunter - wears out its welcome through the album's 10 tracks, the attention required of such highbrow songs lost in the space of monotony somewhere along the way.

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