Band Of Horses has always really been Ben Bridwell. Bearded and blue-collared, he’s the archetypal honest every-man of rock. Saddled with songwriting responsibilities, he’s been the common denominator amid personnel changes, constant touring and relocation, releasing records on his own label (albeit with major backing). His stewardship has seen a rise precipitated by the success of first LP Everything All the Time’s all-conquering The Funeral that culminated in a career-high Grammy nomination for 2010’s Infinite Arms.
- Band of Horses is a band from Seattle, formed in 2004 by the vocalist Ben Bridwell. He decided to start a new band after the break-up of his previous group. There were no problems with finding new musicians, and soon Band of Horses began to play in Seattle.
- 'Mirage Rock' is the fourth album by the Band of Horses. To my humble opinion, it's the lesser one of those four. It's because the album feels like the band is drifting toward 'middle of the road' rootsrockmusic. The style is not distinctive compared to the previous albums. But luckilly the band still have their distinctive sound and their voices.
Band of Horses - Mirage Rock - Record Bar Wilmington. Deluxe Edition contains a bonus CD with 5 tracks taken from the Sessions at Sonic Ranch Studios. Also contains a card with code to access track-by-track behind the scenes videos and in-the-studio photo gallery on the Band Of Horses website.
Mirage Rock, however, is a very different proposition. Remarkably for a band’s fourth offering, it’s only the second that’s the product of a consistent group, the lineup unchanged from Infinite Arms. Settled, Bridwell has duly slackened the reins, adopting a relaxed, collective writing and recording process to capture a sound that’s “loose and raw at times”. Also, the record’s title doesn’t reference a real place, Bridwell calling that notion “a total piss take”. The results, sadly, are sometimes just that, but the joke doesn’t reflect well on anyone. Bridwell’s output has always had a nebulous quality, straddling the divide between standard form and idiosyncratic verve with ease; straight-ahead songs elevated and given a workaday grace. Listening to Mirage Rock it becomes abundantly clear that, shorn of his control, little of the material stands up.
Matters begin decently enough with Knock Knock, a serviceable slab of Southern rock, sputtering along on carefree falsetto and jackhammer guitars. All the Band Of Horses hallmarks are there, yet there’s no focus or heft, no urgency. The back-of-a-fag-packet lyrics tell of a “ramshackle crew with something to prove and a truckload of belief,” once a simple statement of fact, but now one that really is mirage rock. A repeated trick that’s suddenly fooling no-one.
Serviceable is the record’s watchword. As it unfolds, the band feel for something new, but mostly flounder in a Neil Young aping, graspless daze, all soft focus am fare. The close harmonies of Slow Cruel Hands, a song obsessed with the passage of time (a theme long-established in Young’s canon) and the cascading arpeggio guitar of Shut-In Tourist are both pretty, as is the lachrymose Roy Rogers-lope of Long Vows, but they don’t inspire close inspection or repeated listening, undercut by barely-there production. The atmosphere is unfussy but diffuse, as if dampened with gauze. Bridwell’s voice – normally soaring and proudly ragged, doused with reverb, is suddenly neutered and tired.
Stripping back production means the band are forced to show their songwriting hand, but they’re only holding two cards, emasculated rock and aimless jangle, and that’s a worry. Things begin splitting apart at the seams especially when, shorn of ideas, they merely combine the two: the white bread drawl of How To Live, a country ramble bookended by faster sections, while shoehorning a rock section in Dumpster World is almost risible, making it jarringly hackneyed. Electric Music is tiresome, hamstrung by a feckless lyric, and the damage is done by the time the genuinely heady Feud rolls around – one of the few successes – yet its incendiary “I want you to fail!” rings ironically.
Band Of Horses have always been more than the sum of their parts, so the decision to finally explore a settled band dynamic made a lot of sense. Yet it’s too comfortable, old ideas diluted to homeopathic proportions, results half-hearted and strangely spiritless, songs feeling overly long. Where Bridwell’s restless wandering once gave him the latitude to absorb all manner of Americana, channelling it in subtly impressive three-minute doses, settled surroundings make matters feel staid, lacking any sort of visceral thrill that peppers the band’s back catalogue. If he thrives on change and control, it’s time for another upheaval.
‘The Funeral’, from Band Of Horses’ debut album Everything All the Time, remains the band’s biggest hit and most well-known song to date, and is a good yardstick by which to measure their progress over a six-year career. Lead singer Ben Bridwell announced his arrival on that song with the line “I’m coming up only to hold you under”, a lyric outlining the intentions of an emotionally suffocating album on which even the hokeyest of sentiments (“I like to think I’m a mess that you’d wear with pride”) sounded painstakingly genuine. ‘The Funeral’ demonstrates the tightrope that Everything All the Time dared to walk, between the mass-appeal of its soaring, effects-laden chorus sounding like it came from (before ending up on) countless Top Gear montages, and its dense and deeply personal lyrical content which actively shunned attempts toward objectivity or universality. This intense intimacy was the perfect counter-weight to the wide-screen stadium rock being peddled by the rest of the Horses.
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The story of Band of Horses since then has been the story of that balance being lost. By 2007’s Cease to Begin, Bridwell was only just getting away with the kind of mawkish sentimentality that pocked that album (“no-one is ever gonna love you like I do”), and the grandiosity of Everything was starting to be exchanged for pomposity. Despite the “reboot” ahead of 2010’s Infinite Arms — Bridwell was the only remaining player from Everything by then — not much was done to arrest the slide. Carried away on the success of ‘The Funeral’, Band of Horses seemed desperate to write songs that soundtracked your life, but by losing that personal element, they discarded the thing that made ‘The Funeral’ so compelling in the first place.
That Mirage Rock takes a turn towards the low-key, then, should perhaps come as a relief. The record sees veteran producer/engineer Glyn Johns (most famous for recording Who’s Next) take up the reins behind the desk, and it needs to be said that he performs admirably. Mirage Rock is the most elegant sounding Band of Horses album yet, and Johns oversees them play the most assured and varied music of their career so far. Taking most of their cues from ’70s AOR soft rock, the band sound a world apart from the one that was constantly straining to shoot for the stars on Infinite Arms. Taking the band away from the overkill of effects and reverb that have coloured their weakest moments in the past, Johns gives Mirage Rock a genuine depth of sound and allows Bridwell’s voice — sounding here as strong as it ever has — to take centre-stage for most of the running time.
Sadly, it still sounds like the person least interested in what Ben Bridwell has to say is Ben Bridwell himself. Lyrically he is painting with broader strokes than ever, and entire sections sometimes seem like they’ve been written because he felt a song needed another verse. So often he falls back onto clichés, and the album is riddled with country-rock buzzwords about open roads, sheriffs’ departments, and probably a dead dog or two. Opening track and first single ‘Knock Knock’ is one of the worst offenders — “Knocking on the doorway, look what’s coming your way/It’s every I want, it’s everything I need,” goes the chorus which Bridwell repeats ad nauseum — and regrettably so, as musically it’s one of the record’s more enjoyable moments. A song like that deserves a memorable lyric, especially when its vocal is made so prominent in the mix, but instead we’re given little more than a sedate placeholder.
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‘Slow Cruel Hands’ shows at least some imagination, but its narrative somehow comes off as both distant and self-indulgent. “This big city man/I used to rumble with him back in high school”, sings Bridwell, flirting with an interesting tale, but instead just resorting to stock nostalgia with the same effect as, say, taking a sepia-filtered photograph. The sense of disingenuousness permeates the record. Last year’s Decemberists record, The King Is Dead, drove at a similar level of country and ’70s soft-rock pastiche, but managed to do so with both a wry smile and a genuine sense of tribute, a love for the material they were aping. Mirage Rock finds most of the constituent elements in place, but lacks the final push of inspiration to make it anything but a thoroughly unengaging listen.
In the tail-end, Mirage Rock springs into something that resembles life. The stinging ‘Feud’ sounds like Band of Horses of old, Bridwell bitter with emotion as he sings “I want you to fail”. Closing track ‘Heartbreak on the 101’ is a Ryan Adams-alike lament over a slowly strummed electric guitar, and is perhaps the kind of direction the whole record should have gone in.
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Post-Infinite Arms, expectations for a new Band of Horses album are already low, so it’s hard for me to call Mirage Rock a disappointment. In as far as I expected anything at all, it has surprised me in being different to what you’d associate with “a Band of Horses record”, and perhaps the band deserve some credit for pushing their boundaries. That, though, is damning with faint praise for a band once so creative and full of life. Mirage Rock is not travesty or an outright disaster, but it is a failure in more places than it is a success.
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