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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 guitarist
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. 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.
Bridwell and Brooke were songwriting
collaborators in Carissa’s as well as business partners — Bridwell’s
Brown Records label originally worked with Carissa’s
Wierd before he joined the band as a drummer. 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. Initial Seattle-area Band of Horses shows were
immediately packed with fans of Bridwell and Brooke;
one of the first was, in fact, packed with Sub Pop employees
because Band of Horses was opening for their old friends,
Iron and Wine. Interestingly, Bridwell was one of the
first people to introduce Sam Beam’s music to the
label, around the same time Sub Pop released Carissa’s
Wierd’s “You Should Be Hated Here” single
(b/w a cover of Morrissey’s “Suedehead”)
as part of the Sub Pop Singles Club in 2001. In addition
to extensive touring with Okkervil River and the aforementioned
Iron and Wine in 2005, the band self-released a self-titled
EP sold exclusively at shows and on Sub Pop’s website
before recording their debut full-length, Everything
All the Time, with producer Phil Ek at Seattle’s
Avast studios.
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. On “Monsters,” for
example, the undeniable aching in Bridwell’s delivery,
paired with Brooke’s peacefully dusty banjo picking
point towards solemnity, but brighter textures invariably
champion through the darkness. That’s part of the
genius in Band of Horses’ dynamic: they craft intelligent,
classic movements within their songs that result in a
perfect balance of desperation and hope, calmness and
mania, love and fear.
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