After the checks from their break out LP Everything All The Time started arriving on the winds of critical acclaim, the band left Seattle's arduous music culture to find some country-western roots.
For the new album, Cease to Begin, the band moved to Mt. Pleasant South Carolina, nearer to where Bridwell grew up, in Irmo outside of Columbia South Carolina.
Band of Horses cut their teeth at Capitol Hill block party in 2005 and 2006. Both shows featured skinny Bridewell exhibiting what I interpreted to be a drug-addled stage fright. Like the harsh landscape and culture of rural America referenced in Band of Horses' catalog, the performances were touching and terrifying.
The bands's sound pits Bridwell's thin, high Neil Yong vocals against the twang and reverb of re-imaged post-urban cowboy music.
Cease to Begin posits another cold car trip across the West and down into the Southwest where dreams go to die in the Gulf. The tracks are more subdued than tracks on Everything All The Time, which becomes downright epic at times. The album art (a moon over a lake) explicitly says that this record, thematically, is about the night, where as the last album (lake with green trees) was about the day.
I would not be convinced, except that the picture is so gorgeous and, in a cheesy way, so fitting. Even though the new album is more haunting than profound, the sun/moon or day/night paradigm is a no-loose artistic choice.
Along with the same fantastic vocals heard on Everything All The Time, there are fewer heavy guitar sounds and more ghostly prairie organ. Nothing goes horribly wrong, but the psychedelic trends emerging in American folk music are painfully absent.
Is it kitschy for a popular band to strive for the old country-western sound in 2007? - yes probably. But the crux of Band of Horses is a dreamlike nostalgia for the way optimistic people remember America, not protesting against present consumerism and meaningless war(s).
America may need another Dylan-esque cheerleader for the young rural Left, but inoffensive pop—no matter how much facial hair and flannel comes into play—isn't likely to accomplish the cultural task.