Genres are dangerous devices. They help us define what it is we like and find more of it, but they also have a tendency to box us in. We become hip-hop heads and indie rockers, we become absorbed in our genres, and we forget what is going on outside of them. Similarly, artists can be confined by their labels, forgetting all the fun to be had by stepping outside these narrowly constructed boxes.
HORSE the Band refuses to fall into that trap. It plays loud and it usually plays fast. Singer Nathan Winneke’s vocals are all over the place, from growl to shriek. HORSE the Band has fun and will do anything necessary to achieve that goal.
“We brought a whole forest with us, and then we brought a whole bunch of animals, too,” keyboardist Erik Engstrom said of the band’s current tour. “And we get to talk as much as we want, which Dragonforce wouldn’t let us do.”
Engstrom’s presence in the band is part of what makes it so hard to categorize. The keyboard doesn’t traditionally have a place in hardcore, but then again neither does Birdo, the pink Nintendo character who lends his name to the opening track on HORSE the Band’s “The Mechanical Hand.” The use of the keyboard, and HORSE’s knack for writing songs around Nintendo characters, has earned it another label altogether: Nintendocore.
When confronted with this title, and his role in bringing it about, Engstrom laughed it off, saying, “Yeah, I mean, I guess it probably wouldn’t have happened without me, but the funny thing is I never play video games.” He added, “I don’t really care about (video games), but just when I was playing keyboard I was like, ‘Oh, this sound sounds cool,’ and we just happened to have some lyrics lying around about Megaman, and I think that’s how it started.”
This happy accident helped earn the band a devoted following, and while they have stopped playing most of the songs from their first full-length “R. Borlax,” the Megaman-themed “Cutsman” can still be heard at live shows.
HORSE the Band’s taste for the unconventional does not stop at writing songs about video games. Their most recent release, “Pizza,” came about as an elaborate excuse, according to Engstrom.
“That was just a complete joke, and we really wanted to leave this tour that really sucked,” he said. “We needed an excuse, so we came up with the most ridiculous one we could think of, like ‘We need to write an album about pizza.’” Two weeks later they had written and recorded the EP, which includes a cover of the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” theme.
Engstrom was quick to add, “This new album is going to sound nothing like that and we all, like, hate that. I mean, we still think it’s funny but we’re kind of like, ‘I can’t believe we did that.’ (The new album) is going to be way better than that.”
The new album, entitled “A Natural Death,” is slated for release in June of this year, so fans of “The Mechanical Hand” do not want to miss their show in Eugene.
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Horse The Band

What: A Nintendocore band
Where: WOW Hall
When: Wednesday, April 25
Doors open at 7.30pm, show at 8pm.