Horsehands bill themselves as “spazz-jazz-hardcore-prog”, and their excellent debut Sirs certainly careens around the stylistic spectrum with the open-mouthed mania of a kid playing dress up. ‘Tender Vittles’ recalls Man Man’s crazed doo-wop. ‘Kiwanis Ow’ takes you surfing on uppers. ‘Clink’ is a demented jazzy outtake from the Oliver orphans that’s interrupted by William Burroughs dictating through an AM radio.

What is even more interesting are the major shifts within single songs, such as in the first minute of opener ‘Righty’: disjointed, pedal-laden layers build a web that is suddenly swept away by crunchy low-end power chords; a jingly bass riff bounces underneath the wail of a Lynchian Geddy Lee and the screeches of a closely dissonant guitar solo. The trio’s highly rhythmic interplay drives this constant motion (as does some creative mixing). Horsehands have the chops to dive in and out of ideas at will, using flashes of fully formed hooks to tug the ear through pools of stranger material.

But Sirs isn’t a string of schizoid fragments flimsily pasted together: it’s a collage, conceived and executed as a whole. ‘Regional Sweaters’ and ‘Pbthdk’ aggressively restyle ‘Global Sweaters’ and ‘A Spat’ respectively, morphing the shared melodies and settings like a fever dream. A syncopated, insistent one-note riff anchors both ‘Shirts and Skins’ and ‘Ocho.’ Whispered loops, recalling the beginning of ‘Righty,’ appear sporadically throughout the record. Most songs begin and end without clear breaks. These intra-record patterns and references, combined with the deep contrasts within each song, blur the boundaries of individual tracks. Sirs feels like one fluid trip.

Sirs wrings the most out of a power trio format with focused musicianship and arrangement. Horsehands hack through the genre-jungle of the post-X Internet, searching for what ties their myriad personal impulses together.

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