Last Charge of the Light Horse – Year of the Horse
Twenty years is a milestone that calls for reflection. For Jean-Paul Vest, the driving force behind Last Charge of the Light Horse, that milestone coincided this year with the Chinese New Year of the Horse — a convergence that could hardly have been more fitting. ‘Year of the Horse’ is the band’s first vinyl release, a double album featuring nineteen carefully selected tracks spanning the years 2005 to 2025. It is not a hastily assembled compilation, but a considered account of a career that has built itself on the margins of American indie rock into something that long since outgrew those margins.
Vest started in 2004 as a songwriter with a feel for the small, the everyday, the incidental wonder. Raised in Alabama as the son of a boogie-woogie pianist and a French schoolteacher, he had already lived in four American states by early adolescence and spent a year behind the Iron Curtain in Romania. That nomadic upbringing echoes through his lyrics, which read like postcards from familiar but subtly displaced places. The band evolved over the years from a guitar-bass-drums trio into a quartet with Bob Stander on lead guitar, Shawn Murray on drums, and Pemberton Roach on bass, with producer and mixer Jim Watts serving as a quiet fifth member. ‘Year of the Horse’ arrives on vinyl in a remaster by Dave Collins, lending the whole a warmth and coherence that the individual albums, spread across two decades, could never share on their own.
Musically, it is a varied but coherent palette. Vest is never content with one sound for long, and that cosmopolitan restlessness is his greatest strength. The roots rock of early albums like ‘Getaway Car’ and ‘Face to Face’ alternates with the more complex arrangements of later releases like ‘The Sand Reckoner’ and ‘In the Wind’. There are tablas and banjos, clarinets and trumpets, unusual time signatures in 5/4 and 7/4, and yet nothing feels forced. When Stander’s guitar solo erupts at the end of ‘Spoken’ alongside the banjos of earlier tracks, it sounds not like a rupture but like a natural conversation between old friends. Watts’s production is audible throughout: precise, open, never overloaded.
The highlights are plentiful. ‘This is Where’ opens the album with a broad, cinematic sweep that makes clear from the outset that this is no arbitrary gathering of songs. ‘Chocolate and Cherries’ shows Vest at his lyrical strongest, with lines that creep in and linger. ‘Running My Finger Along the Scar’ distils the quiet melancholy for which the band has been praised to its most concentrated form. ‘Kindred Minds’, one of the more recent additions, proves that in 2024 the band is running on more than memory: the song is fresh and driven, with an energy that earlier albums sometimes lacked. And ‘Choose Now’, the most-cited track from the ‘Sand Reckoner’ era, earns its place with the quiet confidence of a song that feels like a classic on first listen.
There are also minor reservations to be noted. Nineteen tracks across twenty years is a considered selection, but for listeners already familiar with the band, it inevitably raises questions about what was left off. The compilation format also carries an inherent tension: the tracks come from different production phases and reflect different lineups and aesthetics. Collins’s remaster does a great deal of good work, but on a few of the earlier tracks, the gap with the later, richer productions remains audible. That is not a failure of this album so much as evidence of how much the band has grown over two decades.
‘Year of the Horse’ is a portrait of a band that has always operated just out of sight of the major music press, yet has consistently delivered work in that shadow that holds its own against more celebrated contemporaries. Critics who have covered the band previously pointed to the poetic quality of Vest’s lyrics, the balance between rock and folk and indie and Americana, and the musical courage to experiment without losing the listener. ‘Year of the Horse’ confirms that picture and adds the dimension of time. This is a band that knows what it is doing, and has known for twenty years. (8/10) (Curlock & Jalaiso Records)
