Band of Horses - Why Are You OK

The Guardian 80

(Virgin/EMI)

After the mainstream ambitions of Infinite Arms and Mirage Rock, Band of Horses’s fifth album makes something of a triumphant return to the wide-eyed, dreamy vulnerability that marked the Seattle band’s first two records. The default mode is anthemic indie-rock that pinpoints the place where wistfulness and euphoria collide, then showers it in effervescent harmonies and melodies. But the songs run the gamut from country-rock to Hag’s unlikely, reverb-laden nod to OMD’s synth hit Souvenir. Ben Bridwell wrote the songs in his garage, and there’s a wonderfully homespun feel to the likes of Casual Party, a giddy, New Order-like guitar rush about the pleasures of dogs and children. Whatever, Wherever is a touring musician’s lovely homage to coming home. Barrel House – wherein Bridwell describes “shifting a chair on the porch, for a better position to enjoy the warmth of the sun” – edges towards self-parody, but emerges as beautifully moving.

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Three years later, on follow-up Cease to Begin, we had a leaner, sharper Band of Horses. Economy was apparently the name of the game for the adopted Seattlites, from opener ‘Is There a Ghost?’s 14-word lyrical limit to the sleeker, lither sound of the album overall, which combined polish with melodies so pointed you could cut yourself on them. It felt like they’d found their niche, both sonically and thematically; they flitted between non-sequiturs (‘Detlef Schrempf’, ‘The General Specific’) and the achingly direct (‘No One’s Gonna Love You’, ‘Cigarettes, Wedding Bands’) with real verve, and genuine purpose.

And then, from nowhere, it all began to unravel. Perhaps the switch from grandiosity to grit between LPs one and two had painted the band into a corner; it might just be that they flat-out rushed Infinite Arms, or plain ran out of ideas. Whatever it was that hamstrung Band of Horses on their third full-length, we were served up an album that sounded utterly indecisive, scored through with confusion and half-heartedness; vague stabs at experimentation backfired, and the quieter moments lacked that signature disarming honesty. You kind of got the impression that they’d tried to be all things to all people, and ended up pleasing nobody.

The less said about 2012’s Mirage Rock, the better; this was no longer a band in the midst of an identity crisis, just one that was phoning it in and aiming straight for radio-rock so lightweight and lacking in substance that it almost seems perverse when you see physical copies of it on store shelves. In early 2014, though - right in the thick of the release graveyard that is January - Band of Horses quietly put out their first live record, Acoustic at the Ryman, a collection of tracks cut in super-high fidelity at Nashville’s Mecca for folk and country. A slew of classics were stripped back, Bridwell’s gorgeous vocals took centre stage, and I remembered what I loved about this band; how much they had going for them, before everything so dramatically went south.

Also encouraging was Sing Into My Mouth, last year’s collaborative covers LP from Bridwell and Iron & Wine that seemed like a no-nonsense delve into the pair’s biggest influences, one that was driven by nothing other than a good old-fashioned love of their musical touchpoints. The album art, of the pair sitting in a bar, beers in front of them, spoke poetically to that idea too. That’s where you hoped the next Band of Horses record would come from, especially as - during the promotion of Mirage Rock - Bridwell had already suggested that the early ideas for LP5 were taking a deeply worrying jam-based, seven-minute-plus shape.

Happily, those initial sketches have apparently failed to come to fruition on Why Are You OK, because only the opening track, ‘Dull Times/The Moon’, stretches past the five-minute mark. Frankly, it’s quite welcome to do so. It’s such a lovely, floaty way for the band to reacquaint themselves with the listener, a gentle cascade of guitars, and with Bridwell’s tentative croon only interrupted by a philosophical spoken word sample. Towards the end, we veer thrillingly into rough and ready rock and roll. For a band that have spent the last six years sleepwalking, this feels like quite the comeback.

I interviewed Bridwell for this site around the time that Acoustic at the Ryman was released, and spoke to a man who’d very naturally, very elegantly, put his nomadic past behind him in favour of domesticity and fatherhood. He is at his best when he’s at his most genuine and, even though those particular topics are never likely to set anybody’s pulse racing, he addresses them with an arresting warmth and affection on Why Are You OK - a record named after an inadvertently profound inquiry from his son.

As much as reading into titles is always a risky business, you can’t help but suspect that ‘Casual Party’ is supposed to represent a counterpoint to ‘Weed Party’ off of Everything All the Time; as he approaches middle age, Bridwell has ditched drugs for dinner parties, where he’s bored shitless by the banality, but is too nice to say so. ‘In a Drawer’, meanwhile, on which J. Mascis lends a fine vocal turn, is a cutely-pitched ode to nostalgia; an old photo sets Bridwell off, and the chirpy, energetic instrumentation reflects the younger self that he’ll never quite recapture.

The conventional wisdom would likely tell you that nobody wants to hear a rock record about domestic bliss, and so Bridwell deserves credit for carrying it off so earnestly; he’s a very difficult man to dislike, especially when ‘Country Teen’s so wistful and ‘Whatever, Wherever’ is replete with such lovely devotion. Jason Lytle, of Grandaddy, has been drafted in behind the boards, and it’s hard not to feel that he’s a fan of the band first and a producer second; like anybody else that loved Everything All the Time and Cease to Begin, he seems to want to steer the band back there, away from the kind of aesthetic that’ll speak to mainstream radio and movie trailers and absolutely nobody else.

Band of Horses have rediscovered the magic of old here; the textures are so often sumptuous, especially on ‘Hag’, with bursts of shimmering guitar melting into a sedate sonic landscape, or the fabulously atmospheric closer, ‘Even Still’. It’s not they’ve gone back on themselves or regressed; it’s just that Band of Horses have naturally, and happily, managed to wind their way back home.

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Why Are You OK? doesn’t sound much like Poco or .38 Special, so longtime fans are likely to hear it as Band of Horses’ best work in nearly a decade on general principle. Don’t assume they’re the majority: Mirage Rock was unfortunate truth-in-advertising for Band of Horses’ ultimate devolution into platitudinal fairground music, but it was still favorably reviewed, debuting at No. 13 on Billboard with even greater success in Europe. While Ben Bridwell may have been disappointed over Mirage Rock’s inability to please everyone, it offers an opportunity whereby Why Are You OK? can somehow sound like an edgy rebranding: even if this album doesn’t sound much like “The Funeral,” Bridwell is at least willing to acknowledge that Band of Horses was once a beloved indie rock band.

So the optics are better this time around. Band of Horses partnered up with Rick Rubin’s label and the production has changed hands from someone responsible for the first couple of Steve Miller and Eagles records to the dude behind The Sophtware Slump. Whether the partnership with Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle is inspired or productive, it’s at least new, which is just as good. While Why Are You OK? lacks the specific sense of place that Seattle and South Carolina embedded in their first two LPs, “Broken Household Appliance National Forest” is a more interesting setting for the same old Band of Horses songs than the 4 p.m. slot at whatever festival still focuses on guitar music.

Lytle’s fingerprints are all over Why Are You OK?, and this is the closest thing you’re going to get to a Grandaddy record without actual Grandaddy: the seven-minute, prog odyssey “Dull Times/Moon” could be heard as Bridwell’s attempt at an “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot”-style opening gauntlet and nearly every open space thereafter is crammed with analog, squelchy synthesizers, ticky-tack drum machines and voicemail messages.

But Lytle’s presence ultimately serves as a reminder of what you miss about Grandaddy rather than Band of Horses. The quirks are try-hard in a way that makes Why Are You OK? unfavorably compare to the recent triumphs in capricious, quasi-indie southern rock. Whereas My Morning Jacket’sThe Waterfall and Alabama Shakes’ Sound & Color felt like the work of songwriters who can upscale their eccentricities to an arena setting, Bridwell’s the inverse—these are populist, mundane songs that tack on their idiosyncrasies in post-production like Instagram filters.

The superficially pleasant aspects of Band of Horses have not yet abandoned them: Bridwell’s unorthodox enunciation and convivial persona are immediately identifiable, and it’s no longer necessary to compare him to any number of high lonesome indie types. And when Why Are You OK? charms, it does so in the humble, disarming manner that's come to be expected. “In a Drawer” fully commits to its aw-shucks nostalgia by having J Mascis pop in for the chorus in a welcome, well-timed “sitcom neighbor” sort of way. When Bridwell writes a song that’s meant to be bashfully beautiful, he gets there (“Whatever, Wherever,” “Lying Under Oak”), and when Band of Horses try to rock out, they succeed and do so functionally.

Bridwell's plainspoken lyricism can still be effective. Amidst the bong-loaded ambience of “Dull Times,” he tries to talk his way through writer’s block and he spends the duration of Why Are You OK? creating domestic still lives—when he sings about sitting on a bearskin rug listening to grandpa, or getting drunk or just sitting on the porch killing time, those songs are about just that. Elsewhere, he’s clutching knives in his sleep, screaming so loud upon awakening that he’s worried the cops will come. He later admits, “Getting me arrested was the strangest way to show me that you’re mine/But it saved my life,” and all of the above is presented with the same genial, arms-around-shoulder amity of rock songs that could be heard within any bar or drive-time playlist between Band of Skulls and Kings of Leon.

Then again, maybe that’s proof of a low-key genius at work here. Much of Why Are You OK? was inspired by Bridwell’s experience as a father of four—recording all night and taking his kids to school looking like the “fucking scariest dad.” Fatherhood teaches some to put their own problems aside and recognize what’s really important when other people are depending on you. That’s great parenting, not necessarily great artistry, and the title of Why Are You OK? becomes as unintentionally truthful as that of Mirage Rock. Every darker, weirder impulse got glossed over while the music gives an agreeable shrug.