Band of Horses
Cease To Begin
Release Date: Oct 9, 2007
Genre(s): Indie, Rock
Record label: Sub Pop
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Album Review: Cease To Begin by Band of Horses
Excellent, Based on 2 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
When Band of Horses surfaced in 2006 with Everything All the Time, the band's rugged take on rock & roll drew quick parallels to My Morning Jacket and early Neil Young. That's mighty nice company for a young band, but co-founder Mat Brooke nevertheless left the lineup that same summer, choosing to blaze his own trail with Grand Archives instead. Ben Bridwell, Brooke's musical partner for nearly a decade, was left in control of Horses -- a daunting position for the former Carissa's Weird bassist, but one that ultimately resulted in a sophisticated, mature, and altogether superior follow-up.
Opinion: Fantastic
"Wheeling through an endless fog, we are the ever-living ghost of what once was," chimes Ben Bridwell on "No One's Gonna Love You," encapsulating the liminal tension between memory and reality that pulls continually within Band of Horses follow-up to last year's sublime Everything All the Time. With Bridwell returning to his South Carolina roots to record, Cease to Begin struggles with a tenuous reconciliation of past and present. The wilting, melancholic reverb of opener "Is There a Ghost" breaks against a surge of guitars and casts lines like "The world's such a wonderful place" in "Ode to LRC" as more hesitant plea than affirmation.
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