Someone lit a fire under Band of Horses' porch. The quintet usually specialize in beard-y reverie, somewhere between Built to Spill's guitar majesty and Seventies AM folk of America. But the Horses rough things up on Mirage Rock, from the "Brown Sugar" bounce of "Electric Music" to the crackling "Knock Knock," where Ben Bridwell sings of "a ramshackle crew with something to prove."

The album was produced by Glyn Johns, who helmed classics by the Stones and Zeppelin. BOH don't put on Seventies swagger; the songs are full of bright Nineties noise-candy pastoralism – an honest version of the basics from guys who have probably spent as much time with Slanted and Enchanted as with Sticky Fingers. Even when Band of Horses go for broke, the South Carolina-bred Bridwell exudes the laidback gravity of a down-toearth Southerner: "Dumpster World" starts like a CSNY-style teach-the-children lament for a ruined planet, then shifts into teenage-anarchist fight-song punk: "Break out everybody in the jail/Let's get it on!" Bridwell entreats. The results make revolution in the streets seem as welcoming as a summer breeze.

Listen to 'Mirage Rock':

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."