Band of Horses / Everything All The Time - SP690

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.

Released: March 21, 2006

Band of Horses / Cease to Begin - SP745

Released in March of 2006, Band of Horses’ debut Everything All the Time propelled the band from early shows opening for friends Iron & Wine, to playing on The Late Show with David Letterman by July, and being nominated as one of ten finalists (along with Joanna Newsom, Beirut, Tom Waits, and, the eventual winner, Cat Power) for the Shortlist Music Prize for that same year. The record also received celebratory press in Spin, Entertainment Weekly, NY Times, Harp_, Billboard, "_Pitchfork":http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/b/band-of-horses/everything-all-the-time.shtml, Magnet, NME, Uncut, and a slew of others. For a lot of reasons, Cease to Begin is the perfect title for this new record. Though they worked with producer Phil Ek again, as they did on Everything All the Time, much has changed for Band of Horses between the fairly recent then and now. Band members have come and gone, including Mat Brooke, who left to pursue other interests and his own band. Core members Ben Bridwell, Rob Hampton and Creighton Barrett moved from Seattle to Mt. Pleasant, SC, to be closer to their families. And, close friends and family have come and gone—some far too early. Necessarily shot through with these experiences, the songs on Cease to Begin are strikingly beautiful, if less elliptical and more straightforward, dealing with the reconciliation of attachment and detachment, the strength that’s found through suffering, and the understanding that we are as significant as we are insignificant. It’s also a great rock record.

SP745

Release date: October 9, 2007

Pitchfork review of Cease to Begin

Stylus review of Cease to Begin

Released: October 9, 2007