I've been meaning to rave about one of my favorite CDs of the year, and I'm finally compelled to in the hopes that everyone will go and buy tickets for the upcoming tour, swinging through Albuquerque and Dallas (and many other places, of course) in a few weeks' time.
Iron & Wine's The Shepherd's Dog begins with a sound far more jangly and warm than anything frontman Sam Beam has ever produced before. His first line, "Love was a promise made of smoke..." is infectiously full of promise in Beam's lonely, literate way. The album never goes downhill from there.
Iron & Wine has always sung gorgeous, small, intimate songs - tales of love and death and loss and the crux of humanity. He's doing the same thing on the new album, only doing it better than ever before. To say that The Shepherd's Dog pulses with a sound far fuller than anything Beam has ever produced is a severe understatement. Beam (famously) recorded the old albums sitting alone in his house, and those albums are truly things of beauty. But this one grabs me in a way the others never did. We hear so much more here than Sam Beam's whisper in his kitchen, and however sparingly beautiful those quiet words of years past were, this album reaches out at me in a way the more quietly gorgeous albums never could.
While some of The Shepherd's Dog's revamped sound is due to more sophisticated production this go-round, a huge part of it is due to Calexico, who co-recorded an EP with Iron & Wine two years ago and saw fit to stick around (in part) to play with him here. With the warmth and fullness that two Calexico members inject into Sam Beam's songs, his abstract tales feel remarkably more accessible than ever before. The sound here is not nearly as quiet as in albums past - Iron & Wine has recorded songs in whispers before. In The Shepherd's Dog, the songs are undulating and confessional and lyrical and absolutely mesmerizing... and they can be loud, too! What's so fun about this album is that we have Iron & Wine's standard strange world of character and events and significance, but the addition of the Calexico players and Sam Beam's evolution as an artist combine to somehow evoke equal parts Appalachia and India. Seriously - there is a banjo and a sitar! That lush, wide-ranging packaging spans from small places to vast ones, and creates a context that has never more beautifully captured the spirit behind Iron and Wine's stories.
Sam Beam calls this "a headphone record." I call it a driving record. Or a long-walk record. Or a leisurely-swim record. Or a cooking record. Actually, it's doing pretty well as an office record at the moment, too...
Buy The Shepherd's Dog. Go see Iron & Wine!
Thursday, November 08, 2007
MMM...good music!
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