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Band Of Horses, a roots-rock band from Seattle fronted by Benjamin Bridwell
(whose reverb-soaked vocals are reminiscent of My Morning Jacket's Jim James).
The melancholy dreamy melodic mid-tempo country-rock of
Everything All The Time (Subpop, 2006) stood out not only for the
carefully constructed compositions but also for the tinges and nuances that
turned each song into a unique stylistic statement, despite the obvious
references to the masters, notably
the catchy Wicked Gil, with decadent boogie rhythm a` la
Velvet Underground,
the anthemic jangling folk-rock of Weed Party,
the ethereal The First Song, an ode in the way of latter-day Pink Floyd,
the Bruce Springsteen-ian meditation Great Salt Lake,
the soulful elegy Monsters,
and especially the stately ballad The Funeral, a roots-rock equivalent of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven.
The short
Cease To Begin (Subpop, 2007), recorded after the departure of
guitarist Mat Brooke,
displayed the same class of the debut but sounded both inconsistent and
uninspired compared with that album. If
Is There a Ghost and
Ode to LRC
almost matched the debut's epos,
several songs were pure filler
or stabs at mainstream pop (the serenade No One's Gonna Love You).
The best ideas (The General Specific, a hybrid of Tamla Motown soul and
country-rock, and the whirlwind square-dance Islands on the Coast)
are not enough to lift the album from the sense of mediocrity.
This was probably a hurried album to capitalize
on the debut's success. It should have been an EP.
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