Kevin Bronson on March 25th, 2009

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The music of Australian duo An Horse is made of the simplest ingredients: guitar, drums, vocals and honesty. None of the first three is going make any jaws drop – drummer Damon Cox is suitably thrashy and energetic, while his Brisbane cohort Kate Cooper sings plaintively, even flatly, over her scratchy chord progressions. So raw and minimalist is An Horse’s presentation that you can’t help but feel a sense of immediacy and, perhaps, vulnerability.

But as Cox and Cooper showed on their second visit to Los Angeles on Tuesday night at the Echoplex, it’s honesty that makes their unvarnished songs shine. An Horse’s is music that practices full disclosure, without resorting to either the elliptical or the hyperbolic. Their debut album, “Rearrange Beds,” released last week, strings together gritty confessionals that ring true to anybody who isn’t afraid to take a hard look in the mirror, or in that mirror that is your significant other. “I had a little too much to think,” Cooper sings at one point, but that clearly isn’t the case.

Interspersed with that almost hyper-observant lyrical material, Cooper and Cox mixed in some genial banter on Tuesday, relaying stories of mysterious injuries sustained in the madness of the South by Southwest Music Festival, an affection for clowns and the trepidation of embarking on a new, if brief, U.S. tour. They came off like your newest old friends. And like the artists to which they’ve been compared – Sleater-Kinney and the Kill Rock Stars crew – they’re the kind of friends with whom you willingly share a few exposed nerves.