The Top 30 Albums of 2007: # 21

Band of Horses
Cease To Begin

Let’s start with a few assumptions about amateur music criticism.  Firstly, your average fan of progressive music usually does not have full grown children, and is probably proud of the fact that they moved out of the suburbs some time ago.  Second, what excites this fan, and fills said fan with feelings of supreme and elite satisfaction, is when progressive music delivers on the progressive categorization and sounds like something new and different; that is to say, the listener had certain expectations and preconceptions about how music sounds, and some band comes along and moves beyond those expectations.  Some fans like their progressive sensibilities a little freakier than the rest, but the assumption is that this mold-breaking is what gets the critical everyman fired up.  Cease to Begin takes umbrage with both of those assumptions.  The first one is easy – they moved from Seattle to South Carolina because, one presumes, South Carolina is considerably more comfortable, particularly if you’ve been trying to make it as an independent musician for 10+ years.  The second one takes a bit of critical cajoling.

You see, when demanding the unexpected, the assumed critical fan presumes (rather uncritically) that the unexpected will sound like nothing else to come before.  Everyone knows what their parents music sounds like, and while some of it’s quite good, it also doubles as music for car trips to Grandma’s and Superbowl halftime shows.  Similarly, everyone knows what tired, washed up efforts sound like.  And a band’s fans know what the band sounded like before.  So if the band stays where it was, or else it moves into Grandma / Superbowl, it shouldn’t be worthy of critical praise.  Right?

Fight this impulse!  The TFO likes the pursuit of irony and the exploration of the abstract as much as the next group of people with outer-borough sensibilities, but let’s be reasonable.  The unexpected delivery of comfortable music shouldn’t lower one’s esteem for the music.  After all, it’s the surprise you wanted, even if it came in the form of sentimental, straightforward classic/roots-rock/pop that makes every Sunday morning better.  Given Band of Horses previous album of comfortable, abstract/haunting-pop/rock that made every Sunday morning better, Cease to Begin defied this reviewer’s expectations in a very good way.  This pleasure is not a guilty one (unlike, say, the Shins, Miranda Lambert, or even more obviously, that beat-boxing douche from American Idol, all of which are guilty like Paris).  It just requires the critic to think progressively about progressive expectations to move beyond guilt and pride to place this album up where it belongs at the end of the year.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to drink some decaf, listen to my Garrison Keillor podcasts, and revisit some Billy Collins poetry with critical impunity, biotch.

-Josh Woodbeck, 2008