It’s a pretty familiar story by now: Band Of Horses, having risen from the ashes of Carissa’s Wierd, won our hearts in 2006 with their stellar debut Everything All The Time, then promptly broke up, in a sense, when Mat Brooke left the band and the Horses moved to South Carolina. Brooke stayed behind in Seattle, formed a new band called Grand Archives, created a MySpace page and posted some demos. In the year since, the band embraced their inner grandness with a name change, signed to Sub Pop, released their demos as an EP, and beefed up from four members to five.
Fans of Brooke’s contributions to Everything All The Time and/or sunny 60′s pop should eat this album up. Recorded in 3 different studios last summer, The Grand Archives is more experimental than one might think. Brooke explains: “We wanted to mess around with as many unorthodox instruments and sounds as we could”. And did they ever – trombone, flugelhorn, violin, pedal steel guitar, slide guitars played with violin bows, cellos… The careful song crafting pays off nicely and album highlights are plentiful. ‘Swan Matches’ is lo-fi and angst-ridden: “When I thought I heard you in the hall, turns out that it wasn’t you at all, guess you’d have to be there”. ‘George Kaminski’ hearkens back to Brooke’s time with Band Of Horses, and his gentle tenor soars above the piano, violin and jingle bells in ‘Sleepdriving’ with vivid lyrics: “It’s nearly dawn, your motel home/The shades were drawn to hide the storm/Without a sound, TV glow/The blankets tied around our throats”. And, in contrast to much of the album, restraint and dreaminess are finally jettisoned out the window with the raucous, frenetic sing-along ‘The Crime Window’.
The layered instrumentation, four-part harmonies and pensive lyrics mesh together extraordinarily well with just a couple of exceptions. There’s a lot going on in ‘A Setting Sun’, giving the track a rather cluttered feel. Conversely, ‘Louis Riel’ is more stripped back and fails to hook the listener, coming off as a bit of a throwaway song. Still, there is enough that is great about the rest of the album we can forgive a misstep or two. With all band members seasoned veterans of the music industry, it’s difficult to think of The Grand Archives as a debut album. In one of the (or at least my) year’s most anticipated releases, Mat Brooke succeeds in turning yet another project to gold.
80%
mp3:> Grand Archives – Torn Blue Foam Couch
Links
Grand Archives [myspace] [label] [buy it]
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It’s a grower this one… I wasn’t all that impressed the first time I heard it. But each time I’ve played it since, it’s started to work its way into my head. I think it’s just way more different to Band of Horses than I was expecting.