Band of Horses returned to Cologne after four years with a show centered largely around their 2006 debut album, Everything All the Time.
The band is currently on the road celebrating the anniversary with a tour billed “An Evening With Band of Horses.” There was no opening act, but two complete Band of Horses sets. In the first set was Everything All the Time performed from beginning to end, followed by a second set drawn from the rest of their catalogue. The latter is deliberately flexible from venue to venue, meaning no two nights of the tour are necessarily the same.
There is a reason Everything All the Time has endured. The album captures so much of what makes Band of Horses distinctive: a carefully balanced mixture of indie rock, Southern folk, and just a hint of alt-country and grunge, wrapped in expansive arrangements and Ben Bridwell’s unmistakable, reverb-soaked vocals. Band of Horses essentially modernized the grand, emotional and textured landscapes of 1970s symphonic rock, space rock and roots rock, repurposing elements of that sonic vocabulary within the framework of 2000s alternative and indie Americana. Sonic inheritance is often subconscious. A band absorbs the atmosphere of the past through the cultural framework, then reproduces fragments of it in a contemporary language.
The band’s continuing popularity in Germany was evident. The Live Music Hall was densely packed from the stage all the way to the back exit, with a predominantly middle-aged audience filling the room.
The evening began with academic punctuality — meaning 15 minutes late.
Frontman Ben Bridwell opened the show on pedal steel, immediately establishing the band’s trademark atmospheric indie-folk and alt-country sound on “First Song.” He then switched to bass for “Our Swords” before moving to electric guitar for “Wicked Gil.” Of course “The Funeral” hit the spot, as it should. The sound mix was clean, the audience absorbed in the songs. Bridwell is the sole original and continuous member remaining in Band of Horses today.
The first set drilled through Everything All the Time in its entirety, and after a 20-minute pause, the night continued with a selection of songs from the band’s remaining catalogue. Songs t mention: “Is There a Ghost”, “Infinite Arms”, “Dilly”, “Laredo”, “Crutch”, “Cigarettes Wedding Bands”, “Ode to LRC”, “The General Specific”.
The two-set format worked particularly well for the band with six studio albums. The first set provided a chronological snapshot of where Band of Horses began, while the second opened the door to everything that came afterward — allowing the audience to hear how that original sound developed without turning the evening into a conventional greatest-hits show.
