Horse The Band debuts "Rape Escape"

We have teamed up with our good friends in Horse The Band to bring you an exclusive track from their forthcoming album, Desperate Living, due out on October 6th via Vagrant Records. The song is called "Rape Escape" and Horse The Band's Erik Engstrom had the following to say about it: "This song is very powerful. It features a guest piano performance from classical pianist Valentina Lisitsa, who is increasingly regarded as the world's best. I found out about Valentina on YouTube a couple of years ago and was instantly taken. She plays like she is possessed by the song, like she is channeling the composer and understanding their intentions and feelings better than they understood them when they were writing the song. She's the most talented player of any instrument I have ever seen, no contest. She'll play with such force sometimes that she jolts a grand piano half a foot across the stage. She just totally gets it. Anyway, I went to see her at a solo recital and asked if she would do a guest performance on our album. For some reason she said yes. "At the end of this song she is playing a fragment of the cadenza of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2, the emotional climax and most technically demanding section of one of the most difficult pieces ever written for piano. Prokofiev wrote it almost 100 years ago after his friend shot himself in the face with a pistol. The end of the piece is instantly iconic. Only a handful of pianists in the world could play the piece, and she embarasses every single one of them. She recorded it on a restored Bosendorfer in her home studio and broke a string while recording it. Anyway I urge anyone who is into classical music to check this song out, especially with headphones because the piano sounds so good, and spend time with the Prokofiev part to get a feel for its subtleties. It's not like the stuff we write or listen to that you can pretty much wrap your head around after the second listen. It's definitely worth the time. And watch a few Valentina videos on YouTube, you will be totally blown away."