Band Of Horses @ Koko, London

For all their beards, down-home authenticity and uncomplicated phrasing, Seattle-born, Carolina-based Band of Horses are the closest America’s come to creating a Coldplay – a bona fide stadium-conquering music-for-the-masses phenomenon – for quite some time.

Whether or not this is a good thing is open for extensive, shouty debate. But before you decide, hear this: just as the canon of practically all British guitar-based pop can be traced back to Lennon’s guitar sound on The Beatles’ 1963 ‘Please Please Me’ album, the US equivalent follows on, sometimes flagrantly, from its country, blues and bluegrass forebears.

When Band Of Horses singer Ben Bridwell claims, “We are the ever-living ghost of what once was” during tonight’s undeniably affecting singalong phones-aloft ballad ‘No One’s Gonna Love You’, it’s hard to argue against BOH’s potential longevity. But something deep inside is sorrowfully whimpering, “It isn’t meant to be like this.”

Band Of Horses released a wonderful album last year called Cease To Begin, a delicate and finely wrought work treading a light-footed line between The Shins and Lavender Diamond: that is, equal parts Amerindie introspection and lovelorn country catharsis. But transposed from the mp3 players and laptops of countless sensitive headphone-toting Pitchfork readers into Koko’s atmospherically unforgiving environs, glorious songs like ‘Is There A Ghost’ morph suddenly into identikit, clichéd, manipulative AM rock fare.

This may be a trick of the light, of course, the final playing out of a masterclass in music marketing in the same way Razorlight were initially sold as edgy and underground before it became clear they were every bit as cynically created as Girls Aloud and 5% as exciting. But somehow it feels Band Of Horses deserve more than this.

The festival season might see them right, of course. Just as The National, Cold War Kids and The Hold Steady have found new and admirably obsessive audiences in the summer season, there’s a fair-to-middling chance Band Of Horses will reel in fans who care. A buoyant take on ‘The General Specific’, coming in late on, is a great example of the sort of stomper that’ll cut it in the field – but it’s not exactly helped by the muddy sound obscuring most of Bridwell’s lyrics and a crowd not even pretending to affect giving much of a shit.

In theory, Band Of Horses have potential sans frontieres. But assuming they’re not (just) in it for the moolah, and assuming they’ve got a semi-hard grasp on their own affairs, they’d do very well not to fall victim to a haemorrhaging music industry’s shrinking pains. A flash in the pan they are certainly not, but what a trusted friend once referred to as a “patronising deployment of the canon” may yet be their undoing. Raise a glass to the Band not wrecking their own party.

Charlie Ivens

Originally published on the-fly.co.uk