Desert Noises is at RecordBar tonight; RIYL Band of Horses

I gave the new Band of Horses album, Mirage Rock, a fair shake – more than a fair shake, even. An above-average shake is what I gave that album. But Mirage Rock is a bit of a turd. I take no joy in writing that. I am into gooey, soaring alt-country, and BOH has done it well in the past. Still, at the moment, it appears that they are out of gas creatively.

The good news is that BOH’s sound (or, arguably, My Morning Jacket’s old sound) has inspired a handful of bands that are doing cool stuff within that sonic framework. One of them is Desert Noises, a quartet from Utah whose latest LP, Mountain Sea (streamable in its entirety here), flaunts some of the hungry verve of that first BOH record, along with traces of other popular Pacific Northwest acts like Fleet Foxes and Local Natives. They’re at RecordBar tonight, with local psych droners Conquerors (who killed it at RecordBar this past Saturday) the Inwards. All this for $7.