Band of Horses’ debut album, Everything All the Time, is one of those great serendipitous moments in music. When it was released in March 2006, it joined My Morning Jacket‘s Z from the previous year as a desperately needed reminder of what could be thrilling about guitar-based alternative rock. Like Z, Everything All the Time became an era-defining touchstone. However, unlike My Morning Jacket, Band of Horses were not an established band. In fact, they were barely a band at all.
In 2004, Ben Bridwell was the ex-drummer from a defunct Seattle indie slowcore band called Carissa’s Wierd [sic]. He had some songs and a rhythm section, though, and crucially, he recruited former Carissa’s Wierd frontman Mat Brooke to help record some demos and play some shows. When the iconic Seattle label Sub Pop suddenly and enthusiastically jumped on the demos and signed the band, Brooke became an ad-hoc member. Along with bassist Chris Early and a couple of different drummers, Bridwell and Brooke recorded Everything All the Time with stalwart Seattle producer Phil Ek, who had worked with Built to Spill and Modest Mouse, among others. They couldn’t have expected exactly how magical the results would be.
By 2006, the Strokes and their new wave/post-punk revival had peaked. The creative inroads made by the likes of Radiohead and the Flaming Lips a decade earlier had been muddied and flooded by stagnant, anodyne fare like the Fray and “Chasing Cars”-era Snow Patrol. Everything All the Time cleared them out and reclaimed them, adding a decisive edge while accentuating the dynamics and elements that gave them mass appeal. It was a declaration that rock music could be big without being dumb, sentimental without being saccharine.
Sonically, Everything All the Time isn’t exactly groundbreaking, even if the surging chords and thundering drums seem like refreshing throwbacks to Sub Pop’s grunge-era heyday. Despite being subtly eclectic, it holds together as a cohesive, self-contained universe, as the best albums do. That is due to a couple of factors. Ek’s clear, spacious production shimmers throughout; even the mellow songs sound cinematic.
Then, of course, there is Bridwell’s voice and phrasing. A thin yet sturdy tenor that slices clean through each song, it is its own instrument. Even more compelling is the way Bridwell alternates word-dense moments of enjambment, often half-yelped, with empty spaces between some words, lines, and verses. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of Perry Farrell, one-of-a-kind nonetheless.
Any notions of novelty and affectation, though, are completely set aside by Bridwell’s genuineness and lack of guile. Two of the best songs on Everything All The Time are “The Funereal”, a multi-movement goth anthem about mortality, and a two-chord rave-up about skipping school and having a “Weed Party”. Neither is any more or less sincere, emphatic or heartfelt than the other.
The record’s many high points are so striking that they nearly negate the fact that a few songs are rather nondescript and faceless. Ghostly pedal steel winds its way through the sweeping, sparkling nostalgia of “The First Song”, truly an unforgettable Side One, Track One. “Our Swords” takes the taut, rhythmic march of early U2 and strips it so far down that interlocking basses preclude the need for a six-string guitar, while “The Great Salt Lake” is an aural road-trip capped off with a sunset reverie.
Despite the pedal steel and banjo, Everything All the Time sounds like it couldn’t have come from anywhere except the Pacific Northwest. It is not a particularly warm record. The album’s most tender lyrics, on “I Go to the Barn…” find the protagonist standing vigil in the best possible John Hughes way, “Outside, by your doorstep / In a worn-out suit and tie.” Tellingly, they were written not by Bridwell but by Mat Brooke. Bridwell, though perfectly sincere, tends to keep a degree of detachment from the listener.
By adding a trove of demos, outtakes, and live tracks, this 20th-anniversary issue of Everything All the Time offers a more complete picture of Band of Horses’ progression during this early period. Die-hard fans will want this material on vinyl. Otherwise, it primarily serves to bolster a couple of Ek’s claims in his new liner notes: he wanted to “make the record feel huge and expansive”, and that it took a lot of work to create Bridwell’s vocal performance. Sure enough, the outtakes and live tracks reveal a much less polished band and singer.
Everything All the Time is the only Band of Horses album to feature this lineup. Within months of its release, Brooke and the others had left. Bridwell has carried on with other Band of Horses lineups and albums. Everything All the Time remains the benchmark, though, and for good reason. A happy accident that could never be replicated, it is an essential record whose stature has only grown over the last 20 years.