Mirage Rock

Band of Horses made their fourth album the way their producer has always made records. Glyn Johns, 70 that spring and newly inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, had worked on records by the Rolling Stones and the Who, and Mirage Rock came out on Columbia on September 18, 2012. The title, Ben Bridwell told Spin, was a joke. Many of the songs were written in a hot, dusty storage garage with rats, next door to welders, and he pictured them hearing his music from a distance, walking over and finding nothing there. He called it “a total piss take”.

Bridwell wanted Johns because he works strictly in analogue. The five-piece that made Infinite Arms, Bridwell with Tyler Ramsey on guitar, Bill Reynolds on bass, Ryan Monroe on keyboards and Creighton Barrett on drums, played together in one room at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, in Monroe’s words “singing into the same mics”, with no Pro Tools and, Bridwell later said, no click track. Johns kept overdubs to a minimum, Ramsey was pushed to rely less on effects, and the band was asked to arrive less prepared and write in front of Johns while the tape rolled. Monroe says they finished in about six weeks. Bridwell promised a looser record with more humour, made in a happier frame of mind than the last one.

“Knock Knock”, the opener and first single, runs on electric guitars and handclaps, with a line, “a ramshackle crew with something to prove”, that the Guardian took as Bridwell sizing up his own band. Its video, directed by Jared Eberhardt, casts the group as the subjects of a cheap old nature film shot around Salt Lake City. “Dumpster World” was the first studio recording anyone heard, in a one-minute clip in June. It starts as a soft harmony lament, “light a candle for the suffering ones”, then breaks into a heavy, distorted middle in which Bridwell calls for everyone to break out of jail and “bust out the drugs”. Getting old runs through the lyric sheet: “I hit rock bottom, I’m getting old” there, and “you’re getting old / You still gotta grow up” at the end of “How to Live”.

The quieter songs did best with critics. “Slow Cruel Hands of Time” is built on acoustic guitars and harmonies, with a narrator back in the neighbourhood where people still know his name, watching out for the police, until time turns him “back into a child”. “Everything’s Gonna Be Undone” is Ramsey’s song alone, and he sings it with Bridwell on harmony. “Heartbreak on the 101”, the closer, is the only track with strings, arranged by Eric Gorfain for The Section Quartet. The song called “Mirage Rock” isn’t on the album at all. It sits on the deluxe edition’s bonus disc, recorded separately at Sonic Ranch in Texas and produced by the band.

The reviews split hard. Paste gave it 8.6, NME 8 out of 10, and the Guardian called it “a guided tour of American rock”. Rolling Stone later ranked it 19th among the year’s best albums. Pitchfork gave it 4.0 and argued there was nothing behind the surface; Spin, at 4 out of 10, called it “an awkward document of a mid-career crisis”; Exclaim! gave it 3 out of 10; Drowned in Sound found it accomplished and easy to ignore. Several reviews quoted the jail-break line in “Dumpster World”, for or against. Metacritic averaged 68, and the album entered the Billboard 200 at No. 13.

Bridwell came round to the harsher view. In 2016 he told Rolling Stone he felt the record had stilted performances and some insincere lyrics, and the printed words bear him out, from the jail-break chant to the slow cruel hands of time turning you “in to molten lava”. A band playing live in one room can only capture what it brings in, and Johns’s method left these songs nowhere to hide. For the next album, Why Are You OK, Bridwell went the other way with producer Jason Lytle, working over every detail until, he said, he’d be surprised if two instruments ever played at the same time.