In a year of adjective-rock album titles, Mirage Rock is as telling of a descriptor as Celebration Rock. The difference is that Japandroids' intentions matched their achievements-- Celebration Rock was a winning testament to good times and good rock music at its most life-affirming. Mirage Rock, on the other hand, evokes an emptiness that couldn't have been intentional. Like an actual mirage, there is no there there on Mirage Rock. All the elements for a typical Band of Horses album appear in their right places-- Ben Bridwell's honeyed whine, the straightforward thrust of the guitars, the earnest hippie-dippiness of the lyrics-- and yet the music dissipates instantly upon impact. Mirage Rock is so lightweight and inconsequential that it really does seem more like an illusion than a record; it's wispy and indiscernible, as if the people who made it had no vision for what it should be.
Band of Horses themselves have become something of an apparition-- what they appear to be aren't what they really are. With 2007's Cease to Begin, Bridwell unveiled a version of Band of Horses that was not the Band of Horses of the group's beloved 2006 debut, Everything All the Time. The original members-- including Mat Brooke, who had been a bandmate of Bridwell's since their days together in the Seattle indie rock band Carissa's Wierd-- had quietly departed. By 2010's Infinite Arms, which found the band signing to Columbia, Bridwell had shed another member and added two more. Frontmen retaining a group identities despite losing their backing musicians is nothing new, of course, and Bridwell made sure to publicly declare Infinite Arms a very different beast from the first two BoH records. But if you cared about this group at all, it was difficult to hear that album and not try to pick out the things that made Band of Horses what it used to be, even if most of those things had been systematically removed by Bridwell and replaced by a flatter, shinier, more overtly southern rock sound.
If Infinite Arms marked a significant turn away from the starry-eyed, backwoods indie rock of the band's early sound, Mirage Rock moves boldly forward into the realm of radio-conscious pop that its predecessor only toyed with-- although "bold" may be too strong a word for a record this mellow and inoffensive. The rush of emotions Band of Horses channeled on its first two albums has slowed to an intermittent trickle, collecting into a very shallow and sad-looking puddle of a record containing nothing and reflecting nothing.
Band of Horses was never the hardest riffing band in the world, but it's disheartening to see just how far they've moved away from actual rock music here. Much of the album falls into the mold of "Slow Cruel Hands of Time", a hazy folk-pop tune that aspires to the soft-focus comfort of 1970s AM radio staples like Dan Fogelberg and John Denver. And Bridwell has neither the lyrical insight nor the vocal gravitas to go any deeper than its superficial veneer allows.
Going deep was never Bridwell's specialty, even on Band of Horses' good records. But he used to make up for it by pushing his music out as wide as it would go, until it wrapped you up like the warmest of bear hugs. Mirage Rock, in comparison, seems shrunken and cold. Lead single "Knock Knock" is strangely gutted, hinting at an emotional catharsis that never arrives. "How to Live" moves along on a snappy start-stop drum beat, but only reaches a peak courtesy of a stinging guitar solo cribbed from Neil Young.
Bridwell's gift for assembling catchy melodies and big, relatable sentiments into neat and clean three-minute packages-- typified by the band's irresistibly heart-tugging breakout song "The Funeral"-- is obvious and not without merit. But over and over again on Mirage Rock, this talent is used to serve up Americana-flavored junk food devoid of substance. The back-porch shuffler "Long Vows" and the annoyingly repetitive "Shut-In Tourist" are essentially placeholders for better classic-rock songs by Bread and Crosby, Stills & Nash, lazily flashing soft-rock signifiers without adding any depth of their own.
But it's the terrible protest song "Dumpster World" that truly exposes Bridwell as a well-meaning but hapless dude who's lost his course. "Break out everybody in the jails/ Let's get it on," he sings, like a callow bro confusing Bane for Noam Chomsky. The line elicits a moment of embarrassment so shudderingly profound, it makes one question any allegiance to the band’s past successes. Disastrously, Mirage Rock seems to have been conceived, consciously or not, as a photo negative of what this band once was, emphasizing Bridwell's weaknesses and negating his strengths. It's not a pretty picture, to say the least. Perhaps it's best to just squint your eyes and hope it disappears altogether.
