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Songs We Love: Horse Feathers, 'Violently Wild'

Horse Feathers.
John Clark
/
Courtesy of the artist
Horse Feathers.

Describing Horse Feathers almost inevitably diminishes the band's music: "Let's see, the lead singer has a beard and a soft voice, and he plays the acoustic guitar, and there's a string section. Oh, and they're from Portland, of course." All those identifying details hold true, and yet Horse Feathers' music never feels slight or ineffectual. Take an exquisitely pretty song like this one, in which Justin Ringle's dark words function like a current that pulls you under when you least expect it.

On Oct. 21, Horse Feathers will release So It Is With Us, and its first single, "Violently Wild," is due out tomorrow. (Watch an album trailer and pre-order here.) As you might imagine, the song's title is a bit of a misnomer — Horse Feathers' music has never fit been particularly violent or wild, lyrical content aside — but there's a zippy quality to it, and the band wears it well. Where the strings in past Horse Feathers songs provided chamber-folk shading, in "Violently Wild" they're employed with a welcome bit of energy, even aggression, without sacrificing the bracing beauty for which the band is rightly known.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)