In the case of Seattle’s Band Of Horses, you can go home again. After guitarist Mat Brooke left the group, leader Ben Bridwell and a few friends decided to high-tail it back to Mt. Pleasant, S.C., to be closer to family and friends. Cease To Begin, like 2006 debut Everything All The Time, was recorded and mixed by Phil Ek (Built To Spill, Modest Mouse) in Seattle, and the sound is again a hazy mess in the best way possible. And if it sounds like Everything All The Time Part 2 … well, it is. All the major guitar chords and reverb-soaked vocals that draped themselves over BOH’s debut are back and sound at least as good, maybe better. Cease To Begin opener “Is There A Ghost” starts things off with Bridwell creakily repeating, “I could sleep, I could sleep/When I lived alone, is there a ghost in my house,” as the guitars swell and aim for a crescendo that never comes. The crescendo does arrive on “Ode To LRC,” whose major chords erupt into big hooks. Elsewhere, Band Of Horses apes ’70s-era Beach Boys with a banged-up piano sound on “The General Specific” and fizzles out on shoegazer interlude “Lamb On The Lam (In The City).” Bridwell and Co. nail the soft/loud dynamic better than any group in recent memory, and Cease To Begin is a fine, fitting return to familiar ground. [www.subpop.com]
—Tim Hinely
