Band of Horses - Everything All the Time

There are no horses in Band of Horses as far as I can see. There are two earnest and bearded young men in woolen pullovers. They like pictures of spindly-armed trees and barren landscapes. They like loud guitars and pretty haunting vocals. They are exactly the kind of young men you’d expect to put their heads together and come up with a record like Everything All The Time. Just last week, I was sitting in my living room talking to another bearded young man about the movie Reality Bites. Pretty much everyone I know grew up with Reality Bites as their pop culture Bible. As we reminisced and quoted and quoted a bit more, we started to speculate as to what Lelaina (Winona Ryder) and Troy (Ethan Hawke) might be doing now, a decade later. Last seen stuttering their affections at each other in atypically grunge fashion across Lelaina’s front yard, I’d like to think she is now pursuing her career as an indie documentary maker. I’d like to think he hasn’t sold his soul to the system and is still questioning the world in an incredibly quotable Couplandesque fashion whilst Dinosaur Jr. plays quietly in the background. The answer came to me this morning. Lelaina and Troy grew up, moved to Seattle and formed Band of Horses.

Every so often I stumble across a record that I love and can’t exactly explain why but it languishes on my stereo endlessly repeating for weeks. Months later, I’ll come back to the record, expecting to encounter an old friend and it will seem alien and slightly shallow, a ghost of the memory of a record. It happened with Sparklehorse’s It’s A Wonderful Life and JoyZipper’s gorgeous American Whip. Six months after the event they began to sound a little hollow. I believe that there are records perfectly suited to a time and a place. Culture and experience leads us to a little window where such records appear as a perfect soundtrack to our failures and triumphs. I believe that Everything All the Time is such a record. As the songs unfurl lazily I hear the missing puzzle piece that connects Ethan Hawke, early 90’s everyman, “outside by the doorstep, in a worn out suit and tie,” (“I Go To The Barn Because I Like The”) to American subculture 2006. This record is the perfect soundtrack for the evolving Grunge generation 15 years on. There’s a nod here to all that’s been good in indie music during the in-between years, a bedrock of old school song writing and a sweltering, writhing struggle to make sense of who we’ve become in the post-Reality Bites years.

Many music journalists have struggled to place Band of Horses. They’ve drawn My Morning Jacket comparisons, and certainly there are shades of similarity in the guitar heaviness favored by both bands. There has been talk of a new Mercury Rev as Band of Horses expand on the melodic dream buzz that characterizes the Mercury Rev sound. However there’s so much more here. There’s the big Canadian noise of epic ensemble bands like Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene as the duo soar through songs like “The Funeral” and “The Great Salt Lake”, giving the impression of a much bigger outfit. In the final three songs there are nods to the dark heart of Neil Young and the delicate song writing of Iron and Wine. Homage is paid to The Replacements as the crunchy guitars of “The Weed Party” stomp out from under the Horses’ controlling fingers. Mostly as I listen to Everything All The Time I hear the last two Low albums, two great bands comfortable with intense minimalism yet producing some amazing big rock records. Unarguably, Everything All The Time is an outstanding debut of a record, an old head on young shoulders; a little bit of everything that went before and a huge helping of something entirely new.

The record plays out like a dream. Not a Mercury Rev, tripped out fairy dream, a crazy half waking, half nightmare of a dream. “The First Song”, aptly titled, opens like a bud of hazy guitar petals beckoning the listener into Band of Horses melodic dream world. The dreamscape of the record is never entirely unsafe. There’s an insistency to the guitars that reassures and is never urgent enough to induce panic, like being lost in a forest with your two best friends on hand to quell the fear. Ben Bridwell’s voice floats through the songs as if calling from the very back of a deep cave. The first three songs pan out sleepily, rising to the Wolf Parade-like stomp of “Our Swords”. Bridwell’s voice dominates the rhythm of this song and practices incredible restraint in keeping a tight rein on the Horses’ ever-straining guitars. The persistent rhythm of the song perfectly partners the staccato lyrics, “out on the wall sounds of banging/ is constant coming from your head.” Album centerpiece “The Funeral” swells blisteringly from the ashes of this restraint. The track is gloriously epic, a huge battle of a song that sounds like falling through lush dream forests whilst wrestling with the complexity of love and loss. When Bridwell sings, “on every occasion I’m ready for the funeral,” you are utterly convinced. This song perfectly soundtracks the beauty, anger and tumultuous emotions of extreme misery. When his voice strains over the line “I’m coming up only to hold you under,” the music, the words, the baying guitars climax to make you feel as if you are actually drowning, in music, in emotion, in some kind of bizarre waking life.

And yet I first heard this song on a mix CD and missed the wonder. Herein lies the faultine (if you see it as such) in Everything All The Time. This is not a collection of songs that stand alone. It is a record sitting in the old vinyl-bound tradition of records and needs to be listened to as a whole. Songs like “Part One” are instantly forgettable alone but are a perfect compliment to the album’s holistic struggle to come up for air and then drag the listener back under. Even the catchiest number on the record, the hook heavy “Weed Party”, which begins with a muted “Yeehaw,” and stumbles into a rebellious toe-tapper, inciting the teenager in you to give in to the rhythm as Bridwell sings, “parents aren’t enforcing the law,” still sounds kind of lonely when removed from the dream sequence of the rest of the album.

Surprisingly the record ends with three quieter songs. “I Go To The Barn Because I Like The”, could be ripped from Sam Beam’s songbook as Bridwell sings understatedly, “Well I’d like to think I’m the mess you’d wear with pride/ Like some empty dress on the bed you’ve laid out for tonight.” “Monsters” is a sweet banjo and tambourine-laden lullaby with a bittersweet refrain which points to the dreamy, searching heart of the record, “If I am lost it’s only for a little while.” St. Augustine is delicately sparse and tinkling, bringing the record to a gentle close. Lyrically, it plays out like Neil Young for a new generation of romantic realists. There is something extremely poignant and honest about the confession, “I know you tried/ I know you’re cursed/ I know your best was still your worst/ When Hollywood was calling out your name.”

Everything All The Time is the perfect vehicle for the post-Reality Bites generation to map their struggles. It’s like Ethan Hawke fell asleep in 1994, woke up 12 years later and Band of Horses took it upon themselves to map the interim. It’s all here, the dreamy wrestling with idealism, the awareness of our own frailty, soaring heights of achievement and the grounding realization that “our best was still our worst,” set against a writhing guitar backdrop that name checks pretty much everything we’ve loved in the last decade. This record already feels like a well-worn pullover of an album because it’s so dense with everything that preceded it and yet so ripe with the possibility of something new. I will return to it in a year’s time and most likely find that the moment has danced on to the next plateau of awareness. It will still be a good record but never again a great record. Band of Horses will continue to make solid, insightful albums. None of them will sound as much like the inside of my head as Everything All The Time does right now.