Lost Horizon

A bright and sunny album from Friends of Dean Martinez? — not likely — but Lost Horizon is the closest thing to an "up" album that the boys have yet put out. Where 2004's Random Harvest was all twilight and settled dust, Lost Horizon is all dawn and evaporating dew. The back story attached to the tunes is still dark this time out, but there's a sense of contentedness and hope as well. Even dirge-tempo numbers like "All in the Golden Afternoon" and "Departure" have a sense of new-day optimism coupled with their Western desert melancholia. In keeping with Friends of Dean Martinez's usual mode of operations, achingly beautiful melodies glide over parched and barren arrangements — mixing the gorgeous with the gritty and delivering the Old West atmospherics that fans of the band require and expect. Like all of the band's previous efforts, Lost Horizon plays beautifully as the soundtrack to a Cinemascope Western film — elongated forms kicking up dust on a landscape of perpetual sunset — and is suitable for filing somewhere between the film music of Ennio Morricone and the cowboy paintings of Frederic Remington. ~ J. Scott McClintock, Rovi