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New Release: Band of Horses “Mirage Rock”
I drove through Nebraska for the first time this summer. As one who was born and raised in the true west of the Rocky Mountains and desert, the Midwest has always occupied a strange place in my imagination. Some picture made of a collage of images: the black and white blankness of Dorothy’s Kansas, the cornfields of Field of Dreams, the flat sky of Oklahoma.
So it was odd, finally, to drive across that land and to discover that it was both all that I expected it to be, and yet nothing like. To me, the land looks like a plateau–the kind you find at the top of mountains before the land drops violently down into narrow canyons. The fact that Nebraska didn’t do this was surprising. It was like when you step off the bottom stair expecting one more step only to find yourself on a flat surface.
The new Band of Horses album is a lot like driving across Nebraska. Mirage Rock is the sound of a more pastoral Americana than the one I have come to know as Band of Horses. If their previous albums gave you the sense of mountains disolving into oceans, then on this album the sound can be likened to hills tumbling into farmland.
I (foolishly perhaps) expected the Band of Horses of my imagination; that sound that was formed on their first album, Everything All The Time, refined and flavored by time. There are moments I’ve learned to anticipate in their music: the slow build, the cowboy-ballad guitars, the quiet melody dropping off into canyons of choruses. But this is not what I got. Instead of lonesome songs about broken fences, I find a song that talks about cotton candy and invisible wind in “Slow Cruel Hands of Time” or pops oddly like gum, on “A Little Biblical.” Songs that feel more like the state fair than the national parks.
This isn’t to say that it’s a bad album. It is just a landscape I am not familiar with. I’m still getting used to it: flat, where there should be craggy peaks. Corn, where the should have been cattle. Horizon lines, where there once were trees. Some songs, though, have already begun to wheedle their way into my mind. Like the Crosby, Stills, and Nash inspired “Electric Music” or the still, spoken-word Johnny Cash sounding “Heartbreak.”
How, or what, I’ll feel about this album long term is hard to say right now. I’m getting used to this new place.