Everything All The Time
The opener on Band of Horses’ debut album could only be called “The First Song.” Its combination of Ben Bridwell’s lump-in-throat vocals and melancholic guitar elicits such an eye-welling response that you can forgive him for not thinking up a proper title. The group’s fearlessly dramatic strain of indie rock isn’t afraid to get heavy in both the musical and lyrical sense. Thanks to stirring standouts like “The Funeral” and “Monsters,” *Everything All the Time* never fails to provide emotional support for life’s most fragile moments.
Achieving musical transcendence is a tricky feat, almost definitively. If it happens at all, it happens naturally — and perhaps nobody knows that better than Seattle, Washington’s Band of Horses. Guitarist/vocalist Ben Bridwell and bassist Mat Brooke formed Band of Horses in 2004, after the dissolution of their nearly ten-year run in northwest melancholic darlings Carissa’s Wierd. Carissa’s Wierd trafficked in sadly beautiful orchestral pop, whose songs told unflinching stories of heartbreak and loss, leavened with defeatist humor. And, Band of Horses rises from the ashes of that well-loved and short-lived band. After playing music with each other for over a decade, Bridwell and Brooke picked up together again when Bridwell began fleshing out his compositions post-Carissa’s. “It was really just a natural thing we started doing,” explains Bridwell. Buoyed by Bridwell’s warm, reverb-heavy vocals (which strangely channel a dichotomous blend of Wayne Coyne, Brian Wilson and Doug Martsch,) Band of Horses’ woodsy, dreamy songs ooze with amorphous tension, longing and hope. At times raggedly epic (“The Great Salt Lake”) and delicately pensive (“St. Augustine,” “Monsters”), Everything All the Time is an album painted gorgeously in fragile highs and lows.
Wedding the elemental, earthworn rock of My Morning Jacket to the atmospheric pop of the Shins or Red House Painters, this debut from Sub Pop signees Band of Horses is immediately, invitingly familiar. But if its roots are recognizable, the music is anything but commonplace.
Band of Horses is the phoenix ascending from the carcass of Carissa's Wierd, Ben Bridwell and Matt Brooke's former band.
To a child, hearing the name Band of Horses will conjure up amusing images of a horse sitting on a drum kit rather comically, possibly with sticks attached...
Band of Horses - Everything All the Time review: Band of Horses have put together a concise, solid indie rock album.