Band of Horses: Mirage Rock

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Band of Horses
Mirage Rock
(Columbia)

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There’s an inviting, laid back feel on the new Band of Horses album, Mirage Rock, and the music comes off more like a down-home fireside jam than a traditional album.  The 11 new tracks feature an enhanced country music sound and while there’s no stand-out, must-hear songs, the experience of listening to the album in itself is the highlight.

The album begins with “Knock Knock,” one of the more rock-oriented songs. But it’s songs like “How To Live,” with its interesting vocal and musical melodies, and the upbeat “Electric Music,” which give a better glimpse at the mellow, AM rock vibe, which functions as the connective tissue between a majority of the tracks.  The singing is upfront and often beautifully harmonized in songs like “Slow Cruel Hands Of Time” and while they may have never lived in the desert with a horse with no name, you wouldn’t know it if you heard “Dumpster World” because it sounds like an unreleased America track that turns it up at the halfway point then fades back into the lonely desert.  The album ends on an odd, but interesting note with “Heartbreak On the 101,” which has a Tom Waits type voice-over and is as much prose as a song, but beautiful either way.

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Tim Needles is an artist, photographer, humorist, and writer from Long Island, NY. His writing and art work has been seen in multiple exhibitions and publications around New York as well as the Photographer’s Forum, French Photo, the New York Times, and LI Pulse magazine. He is also an educator and currently teaches art and film at Smithtown, NY and as an Education Leader for Adobe. He was recently the recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Award in Washington DC and serves as the director of Strictly Students, a non-for-profit group for media and education. His work can be seen on his website: www.timneedles.com

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