Band of Horses play a free in-store at the Queen Anne Easy Street Records tonight at 11pm. It’s a record release party for their new album on Sub Pop, Cease To Begin. Here’s what I had to say about the record in this week’s cd reviews:

BAND OF HORSES

Cease to Begin

(Sub Pop)

**

Like most clichés, there’s enough truth to the hoary record-industry myth of the sophomore slump to make it stick. A great debut can create impossible expectations, and a sequel even of equal merit will still lack the element of surprise that made its predecessor seem revelatory. A band can spend their whole lives making one record, and only a year or two making their next. And a lot can change in the meantime.

So it is with Band of Horses’ sophomore album for Sub Pop, the aptly titled Cease to Begin. In the time since the breakout success of Everything All the Time, the one-time Seattleites have lost the considerable talents of guitarist (and sometimes songwriter) Mat Brooke (now of Grand Archives), they’ve relocated back to South Carolina, they’ve swelled to a six-piece live band, and they’ve licensed their hit “The Funeral” to everything from movie trailers to a Wal-Mart ad campaign.

Opening track (and lead single) “Is There a Ghost” is almost enough to make the listener forget all that, though. The surging refrain is the album’s most triumphant moment (though it lacks some of the rush and thrum of the live rendition) and also it’s most similar to the pop grandeur of Everything All the Time. So it’s a perfect transition, but also a dangerously early peak. From there, the Horses successfully channel Neil Young’s dirge stomp on “Ode to LRC” and lay down old live favorite “No One’s Gonna Love You.” “Detlef Schrempf” is a plodding slow dance. “Islands on the Coast” is another brief, soaring pop arc. Singer/songwriter Ben Bridwell has said that Cease to Begin would sound more country or Southern than their partially cloudy debut, and “The General Specific” makes good on that—it’s a full-on piano-pounding, knee-slapping, hand-clapping honky-tonk jam—as does the church organ and dusty gospel warble of “Marry Song.”

Cease to Begin isn’t a bad record, but it falls short. Maybe it just isn’t possible to be More Everything More of the Time. ERIC GRANDY