American Motors – No Horses

“No Horses” it’s the lead single from American Motors their second album, “Functional Music”, due November 6 on Expert Work Records and the follow-up to 2024’s “Content”. Dustin White (guitar, vocals) and Alex Steward (drums) went back to J. Robbins at his Baltimore studio Magpie Cage to make it, the same room and the same producer as last time.

The lyrics circle a town too broke to keep a horse around, a new centre going up that might be dialysis or might be data (White’s words suggest it barely matters which), and someone using their one phone call from a cop car to dedicate a song. What gets me is the line about covering a bad tattoo with an even worse one. It’s a small image, but it does the job the rest of the song is reaching for: change that isn’t really change, just a different shape of the same problem.

The video backs that up in its own way. White shot it himself inside the Large Scale Systems Museum in New Kensington, PA, on a 1960s Arriflex 16ST loaded with expired Kodak film, teaching himself the camera from scratch before turning it on the band.

For a song about a town too broke to keep a horse, it sounds remarkably alive.

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