I have fond memories of hearing WarHorse for the first time: in a room with a bunch of Southampton punx who were soon agog while the former Southern Records minion who’d slung it on grinned at their agogness. It came about at a funny old time: heavy, weird, Sabbath-imbued music had obviously been rolling on for a while, and though it was still a minority concern it was nevertheless on the cusp of something else thanks, variously, to Isis, Sunn O))), Queens Of The Stone Age and the internet. Like early 80s hardcore, this meant there was still a heckuvva lot of variation when it came to how the sound was being interpreted, and if you took a random sample (Boris, Burning Witch, Electric Wizard, Noothgrush and Toadliquor, say…) you’d find some very different bands operating within the same rough parameters. WarHorse, too, laboured on their own terms. Variously lumbering between the grunting funereal sorrow of Thergothon and the drug-battered stumble of Electric Wizard, their sole full-length winds a mysterious course that’s heavy both sonically and emotionally. Taking in woozy soft passages and hernia-inducing heaviness, the band fashioned a ruined castle of sound: creepers, vines and spiderwebs caught between vast, ageless stone pillars and battlements that the elements haven’t yet managed to fully conquer. Occasionally there’s a slip, a moment’s awkwardness or a faltering lapse that serves to distract, and while this might mean ‘As Heaven Turns To Ash…’ doesn’t occupy the same grand, hallowed space as ‘Jerusalem’, ‘Dopethrone’ or ‘Towers’ this reissue (which includes the band’s ‘I Am Dying’ EP) still stands as a grand and momentous excavation destined to be slobberingly puzzled over by doom metal archaeologists the world over.
Read an interview with WarHorse here