There are two types of bands in this world; those who make tight, focused albums with a clear sense of purpose and those who make 18-track double LPs because they physically cannot stop themselves from making music.
Road Movie Dream is what happens when a band sets out to record a single album over a weekend and accidentally makes a second one in the process. A project so sprawling, so packed with ideas, that they had to actively stop themselves from making it a triple LP. If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know, let me spell it out: Mighty Horse is operating on pure creative momentum at this point. The tap is running, and they’re just letting it spill all over the floor.
Wherein their debut album The Bottle and the Whip was a neatly contained indie-folk experiment, Road Movie Dream is an entire road trip, complete with detours, questionable gas station snacks, and an ever-growing pile of coffee cups in the backseat. It’s the vibe of a really fun, really long road trip with the best company wherein the story of the journey can be just as good as the destination.
The album’s opening moments set the tone for a restless, dynamic ride. “Hey Lah” introduces the album as this indie-folk-meets-alt-country-meets-post-rock a la Explosions in The Sky in their best, most fitting tracks for the Friday Night Lights soundtrack before immediately swerving into “Crystal Green”, a dreamy, reverb-drenched track that feels like it was made from the new wave era, next to the hits of bands like The Cure at their poppiest or one-hit wonders with deep cut gems like A Flock of Seagulls or Dexys Midnight Runners. Another album highlight, “Even a Broken Heart is Beautiful,” lunges into country blues, as if Mighty Horse just remembered they also love being loud and harmonious.
The result is an album that feels like a carefully curated project, like one of those mixes where you slowly realize that the person who made it has very strong opinions about music and also might be in love with you.
It’s clear that Road Movie Dream captures a band in the midst of a creative surge, and you can definitely tell. This is the sound of a band so creatively charged that you can feel the caffeine, adrenaline, and sheer restless energy pulsing through every track. Even on the more somber moments like on “A Reason To Get Out Of Bed” with its melancholic vibe punctuated by an amazing trumpet solo that feels like the musical equivalent of staring out a rain-streaked window on a long drive, all these songs carry an undeniable, unstoppable momentum.
This is an album made by a band on an absolute tear, and it refuses to apologize for how much it has to say. Normally, an album this long would overstay its welcome, like that guy at a party who won’t stop talking about his screenplay. But Road Movie Dream pulls off the rare trick of actually earning its runtime. Every track maintains a sense of motion as though the album is gently guiding you through some vast, emotional dreamscape where everything is simultaneously sad and hopeful at the same time, and it’s all the more reassuring for it.
By the time you get the closing title track, you realize this album hasn’t just been playing: it’s also been hugging you for the past 90 minutes.
Road Movie Dream is a musical fever dream, a genre-spanning odyssey, and the sound of a band that has no idea how to slow down and no interest in learning. It is overwhelming, self-indulgent, and mildly exhausting, but also completely exhilarating. Like I said earlier, Road Movie Dream is the vibe of a really fun, really long road trip with the best company wherein the story of the journey can be just as good as the destination… so fasten your seatbelts and enjoy the ride.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
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