Horseshoes

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The band Horseshoes is a moniker for musician Austin Greaves, currently based and operating up in Washington D.C. He created Desert with a small team of backing musicians by his side, and, though details about Greaves are scant, we do gain a good deal of insight into his thought process from a press release he did for Pressed PR. In it, Greaves asserts that Desert is an “album…about loss and new beginnings, coming to terms with the past and considering the future.” This sentiment is duly felt in the album’s lyricism, with Greaves orbiting around tales of sorrow and picking through them to find the bare lessons within. In the press release, it’s also noted that Greaves’ main influences are Jeff Tweedy and Elliott Smith, with the both of them having considerable impact on Horseshoes’ overall sound. The hushed, raw and intimate vocal performances from Greaves echo some of Smith’s best work, and it’s clear that Greaves has taken an expert ear for ambience from Tweedy’s stylings on early records with Wilco. However, before comparisons get out of hand, it should be noted that Greaves is not fully indebted to these artists; rather, he takes their strengths, adds his own flair and delivers a project that’s solid and fully formed, both treading familiar ground and carving out a path all his own.