Dark Horse (song) - Reception

Reception

The US release coming when it did, a third of the way into Harrison's high-profile tour with Shankar, much of the critical reaction to the "Dark Horse" single in America centred on the perilous state of Harrison's voice. "Dark Hoarse" was an immediate and widely used moniker, as some concert reviewers wrote disparagingly of Harrison "croaking" his way through Beatles classics such as "Something" and "In My Life". Almost three decades later, Rolling Stone contributor Greg Kot still found fault with "Dark Horse" due to Harrison's strained vocal, while viewing the song as "continu in the condescending autobiographical vein" of Material World tracks like "The Light That Has Lighted the World". In his Dark Horse album review for the NME, Bob Woffinden took exception to Harrison's lyrics also, and ridiculed "Dark Horse" as "a putdown of Patti, an affirmation of Harrison's male chauvinism – he was on top of the game all through".

Billboard magazine's album review referred to Harrison "riding high" with the title track and noted "lots of FM potential" in the songs on Dark Horse. In another highly favourable review of the album, in Circus Raves, Michael Gross defended the Harrison–Shankar tour as being "plagued by untrue press reports creating a new, unbounded music that defied labelling as easily as the men involved defied national boundaries", and wrote that "Dark Horse" "brings back memories of The White Album, as Chuck Findlay, Jim Horn and Scott dart through the intricate melody on flutes".

Brian Harrigan of Melody Maker found Harrison's gruff vocal delivery a bonus, writing that he "coaxes a tremendous amount from his normally unimpressive voice" and sings "particularly well" on the title track. Harrigan highlighted "Dark Horse" as "easily the strongest number on the album", with support musicians Newmark and Preston "playing up a storm". Writing in their book The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, a couple of years after the single's release, NME critics Carr and Tyler similarly approved of Harrison's husky singing on "Dark Horse", praising it as "definitely a style to pursue". Alan Clayson has written of the song's "sandpapery appeal", the lead vocal "a not unattractive cross between McCartney and Rod Stewart".

A number of reviewers rate "Dark Horse" among Harrison's finest post-Beatles compositions. In his "definitive" 1977 book The Beatles Forever, Nicholas Schaffner opined that "Dark Horse" could have been one of Harrison's most successful singles had he "only waited to recoup his voice before committing it to tape". Seven years after his unfavourable review in the NME, Bob Woffinden acknowledged that the song would have sounded "really good" had it been "graced with good vocals" and released in a "different context". Simon Leng describes "Dark Horse" as a "jaunty and pleasing hit" but rues the fact that Harrison did not marry up his vocal from an earlier, bluesy demo with the backing he subsequently recorded in LA. A bigger chart hit would surely have been the result, Leng reasons, if the song's vocal track had not sounded "like the torments of a man swallowing razor blades". Dale Allison is another to subscribe to this view, while Harrison biographer Elliot Huntley writes that "Dark Horse" might have made an "excellent stand-alone single", backed by "So Sad". This coupling would have provided Harrison with the necessary product to promote on tour, Huntley observes, without "derailing at full speed", which the rushed and vocally compromised Dark Horse album effectively did.