 by Steve McPherson
It seems like fewer and fewer drummers these days are content to stay behind the kit for the duration of their careers. I guess it goes back to Ringo Starr, really, but Phil Collins opened the floodgates. Dave Grohl goes from Nirvana to fronting the Foo Fighters and then Grohl’s own drummer Taylor Hawkins made the jump to the front-and-center mic with the Coattail Riders last year.
You might not be familiar with Seattle indie rock semi-legends Carissa’s Wierd (and yes, it is spelled that way), but when the band decided to go their separate ways in 2003, drummer Ben Bridwell wasn’t ready to quit the musical life.
 “Me
and Mat Brooke [Carissa’s Wierd’s principal songwriter] had talked
about doing a new band as Carissa’s Wierd was breaking up,” explains
Bridwell (who now sings and plays guitar in Band of Horses) by phone from Seattle.
“So once that actually happened and the band was no more, we kind of messed
around a little bit, but it didn’t really take flight at all. So I started
messing with writing some other stuff and Mat didn’t really seem to be
that interested in being in a band again—you know, the whole process of
becoming a band. He was a little bit hesitant, so me and these other two dudes
just started messing around and eventually we started playing some good shows
and we convinced Mat to play with us for a couple songs when we were opening
up two shows for Iron and Wine here in Seattle. So once we got him up there
for that he kind of had the bug back in him again. That’s when it really
started sticking.”
Before I’d heard their album, I had heard that Band of Horses was composed
of ex-members of Carissa’s Wierd, so I was surprised by their debut disc,
Everything All the Time. Strongly redolent of classic American songwriting
in the vein of Neil Young and the Band, but mixed with the worry and vulnerability
of ’90s indie rock, Band of Horses stays away from the path forged by
Carissa’s Wierd, save for the two quietest tracks on the album, “I
Go to the Barn Because I Like The” and “St. Augustine.” Brooke
performs co-lead vocal duties on both of the beautifully delicate numbers, strengthening
the connection to their former band, but what’s up with the sentence fragment
song title?
“It really comes from my inexperience with doing this [leading a band]
and my iffy confidence level sometimes,” says Bridwell. “They’ve
all had three different titles. You’ll find demos with totally different
names and lyrics. So it was down to the last week or something and [the label]
was like, ‘You’ve gotta give us the titles of the songs, because
they’re putting out the promo copies.’ As far as ‘I Go to
the Barn …’, me and Mat did that song when we first started writing
shit after Carissa’s Wierd and it was called ‘I Go to the Barn Because
I Like the Horses.’ So that’s why I left that out, because then
we formed Band of Horses. And then later we would do a little medley of that
song and ‘Monsters’ so we would call it ‘I Go to the Barn
Because I Like the Monsters,’ and so we put ‘Monsters’ after
it [on the album], so it’s kinda supposed to read as a sentence that way.”
No doubt that same novice’s approach led to the first song’s title,
“The First Song.” As an opener, it’s about the best thing
you could ask for. The clean, arpeggiated guitars, wash of cymbals and reverb-drenched
vocals set a tone that is somehow equally evocative of wintry nights and humid
summer twilights. Bridwell’s impressionistic lyrics and high tenor is
reminsicent of My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, which isn’t really
surprising, given their shared backgrounds in the South.
“I grew up with a lot of my parents’ music,” says Bridwell
about his upbringing in South Carolina. “My parents were real into music
and a lot of old soul from the ’60s and ’70s and a lot of good rock
and roll like Led Zeppelin and Neil Young and Rolling Stones. And my brother’s
four years older than I am, so when he was in junior high, he was one of the
only weird kids in the whole city, so he was totally passing me awesome shit
when I was young. It’s trying to make music that I would have liked when
I was that age and just getting into pop music in a rootsy kind of way.”
 They’re
definitely a band that’s not afraid to show their roots, and it is to
this (as well as a heart-on-sleeve aesthetic that owes more to the tradition
of the wake than the funeral) that they owe their artistic success. Everything
All the Time is an album that encompasses, stretching from the delicacy
of closer “St. Augustine” through the epic centerpiece “The
Great Salt Lake.” Along the way, lines float to the surface that are alternately
heart-rending and -mending. “To wake next to you/ in the morning/ and
good morning to you/ How do you do? / A good morning to you/ and more covers
for you/ Sleep soundly dears/ I have to go,” from “Part One,”
is a good example of a moment of incredible tenderness folded into a gentle
melody against a sympathetic acoustic background. The tone never veers into
self-pity, instead tending towards support, as in “The Great Salt Lake”:
“Now if you find/ yourself falling apart/ I’m sure I could stand/
on the Great Salt Lake.” The song itself rises on a tide of guitars, lifting
the whole album up in the process, and the disc achieves a unity and balance
that eschews the string-of-singles approach as well as the concept album approach.
Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm is better the less you hear of it; The
Mars Volta’s Frances the Mute is incomprehensible moment-to-moment.
Everything All the Time works both as a piece and in pieces.
In a music scene whose memory doesn’t seem to extend past the late ’70s
sometimes, it’s refreshing to hear music that reaches back into a golden
age of rock and roll that we’ve been content to forget since the early
’90s. Band of Horses pulls a host of classic rock tricks out of their
bag (quiet verse into loud chorus on “The Funeral,” minor verse
into major chorus on “Wicked Gil”) without ever sounding like they’re
just going through the motions. Bridwell even apprised me of one I’d missed
in “Wicked Gil.”
“The other thing in that song is at the end,” says Bridwell. “That
one piano key? That trick always works, no matter who does it. Always throw
in the one piano key and you’ll totally grab people.” ||
Band of Horses perform Sun., June 4 at the Seventh
St. Entry with Mt. Egypt and Duplomacy. 8 p.m. $10/$12. 21+. For more info
on Band of Horses, check out their official website at bandofhorses.com
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