Guitarist/vocalist Ben Bridwell and bassist Mat Brooke formed Band Of Horses in 2004 after the dissolution of their nearly ten-year run in northwest melancholic darlings Carissa’s Wierd. Carissa’s Weird trafficked in sadly beautiful orchestral pop, whose songs told unflinching stories of heartbreak and loss, leavened with defeatist humor. Band Of Horses rises from those ashes. Buoyed by Bridwell’s warm, reverb-heavy vocals (which channel a strange brew of Wayne Coyne, Neil Young, and Doug Martsch), the group’s woodsy, dreamy songs ooze with amorphous tension, longing, and hope. Both raggedly epic and delicately pensive, this is an album painted gorgeously in fragile highs and lows.