Ben Bridwell writes songs with odd gaps and leaps, and his group Band of Horses plays them with a scintillating gloss that’s in the best pop tradition. On two long-players—2006’s indie smash Everything All the Time and last year’s equally successful Cease to Begin—goofy spiritualism merges with old-fashioned obsession in a series of ingenious set pieces. The music is tense in all the right places, but Bridwell is a Southerner, and knows how to relax.
“We go to Folly Beach, which is maybe a 20-minute drive,” Bridwell says from his Mt. Pleasant, S.C., home. “We’ve been surfing all winter long, so we spend most days out there.” Born in 1978, Bridwell grew up in Irmo, near Columbia, and remembers the South Carolina scene of his youth in true rock ’n’ roll fashion. “We’d get notes from my mom to get into this one club, Rockefeller’s, in Columbia,” he says. “But really, it was straight-edge bands.
The early-’90s indie scene caught Bridwell at the right moment. “By the time I was in high school, bands like Pavement and Archers of Loaf and Sebadoh and things like that were comin’ out and comin’ around sometimes,” he says. “So that kinda stuff started influencing us, where the other people were more into a lot of jam-band stuff.”
In the late ’90s, Bridwell found his way to Seattle, where he played in groups such as the intentionally misspelled Carissa’s Wierd, started writing songs, and formed Band of Horses in 2005 with guitarist Mat Brooke. They played well-received shows opening for Iron & Wine and recorded Everything All the Time with producer Phil Ek, who had previously worked with The Shins and Built to Spill.
Everything showed the influence of Pavement and ’90s Southern-fried pop (“In the beginning, it was the North Carolina indie-rock stuff like Superchunk,” Bridwell recalls), while Ek’s high-definition production layered chiming guitars on top of Bridwell’s languid, rubbery songs and bathed his piercing tenor in tubs of reverb.
“The reverb, that was my fault,” Bridwell laughs. “I was really not very confident as a singer or a lyric-writer. More a storyteller in that perspective. So it had to mask my lack of talent sometimes.”
Whatever its genesis, the reverb became an aural signature for Band of Horses. Everything sounds as in love with form as any number of indie and power-pop touchstones, with “Wicked Gil” an update of the diffident mixture of pop and R&B Carolina bands such as The dB’s once played. It was an accomplished debut, and the shifting time signatures and massed guitars complemented Bridwell’s serpentine compositions, which almost always went somewhere unexpected.
Cease to Begin reunites the band with Ek, although the group has seen personnel changes (Brooke departed in 2006) as well as a move from Seattle to South Carolina. Cut at Echo Mountain Studios in Asheville, N.C., Cease feels denser, tougher and more abstracted than the debut. In power-pop parlance, it’s Big Star’s Radio City compared to #1 Record.
“With this record we took a different approach,” Bridwell says. “We did the overdubbing in Seattle. We wanted it to be more laid-back. Some of the songs were kinda sketches. It was a laid-back vibe and all the band—at that time there was four of us, I guess—we all lived in a hotel in Asheville while we were doin’ it, really lived and breathed that record every day.”
If Bridwell’s tart, bright voice has an antecedent, it’s in the singing of Thunderclap Newman’s Speedy Keen on the 1969 single “Something in the Air,” or maybe it’s Brian Wilson’s falsetto. He doesn’t simply hit a high note—he bores through it like a laser beam. On Cease’s opener, “Is There a Ghost,” he repeats, “I could sleep / When I lived alone / Is there a ghost in my house,” over two artfully reiterated chords.
The songs play everything for drama, but Bridwell and band, which now includes keyboardist Ryan Monroe (“A friend of mine I played baseball with as a kid, who’s a musician now,” he says) along with bassist Rob Hampton, drummer Creighton Barrett and guitarists Bill Reynolds and Tyler Ramsey, create tight, stylized arrangements.
Cease is almost absurdly mannerist, and it works. Lyrics such as, “Lighten your load and see / How I killed the wheelbarrow I borrowed,” suggest Bridwell’s talent might lie in his ability to make the mystical seem homely. With handclaps and piano, “The General Specific” evokes The Beach Boys at their loopiest, and “Window Blues” takes a pass at rueful alt-country.
Or maybe it’s just that, for all its intensity, the record is a breeze. As Bridwell says, “It almost felt like it was too easy, ’cause the first one was so scary, it being my first time doing anything like that. It was a bit nerve-racking. This one was the polar opposite.”
