Iron & Wine
Manning Bar
March 11, 2008
Welly well, this one is bound to split the faithful. But they can't say they weren't warned...
When Shepherd's Dog spilt from the Iron & Wine crucible last year, it was not quite what many may have expected. Where previous experiments had delivered a hushed, delicate substance, salty, brittle and liable to dissolve under the weight of no more than our gaze, in its place we now found a malleable, multi-hued affair with a whole lot more bounce.
There were hints of this fuller sound on 2004's Our Endless Numbered Days, but the image that still came to mind when I thought of Iron & Wine was the bushy-bearded The Creek Drank The Cradle and its fragile, acoustic, front porch whispers. We were reminded tonight of the intimacy of these early songs, the husky hush over finger-plucked guitar, when Sam Beam and sister Sarah took to the stage for the hauntingly gorgeous 'Trapeze Swinger', its eloquent graffiti at the pearly gates a peek into a vivid past near-perfect. Sitting back-to-back with 'Jezebel', we are struck by the powerful forces that are absence and memory, and how well Beam paints with these themes.
At this point, for better or worse, things took a turn for the fuller. The band took a few songs to settle in, but once they did there was no denying they had found a groove. What's more complicated is deciding whether this groove was the right one. I expect there will be a bit of angst about the drumming, and the general direction in which it carried the show. The dub element gave Sam a fairly strong base from which he could branch out, opening up new spaces for jamming out a few ideas. It was a little unsettling to see this go as far as the Fozzie Bear pedal (wokka wokka), but when it clicked it carried us along quite well.
A niggling feeling I couldn't shake was a certain paint-by-numbers approach from the band at times, coming across like session musos out on a field-trip. There wasn't the same fire in the belly Sam clearly has, and Sarah was really the only other one who kept us believing that they meant it. So when working it was a treat, when not quite working it came across as a lite-dub Wilco.
The fuller arrangements worked really well with new songs such as 'Boy With A Coin' and the fantastically hewn 'House by the Sea', and even gave a nice kick to older works - 'On Your Wings' and 'Cinder and Smoke' revelling in their make-overs while retaining their low-key rhythmic genius.
Yet one also couldn't help but wish, at times, for a little more breathing space for Sam's more delicate pieces. 'Sodom, South Georgia' needed stripping right back, the beautiful bare bones on the album sadly over-dressed. And surely with a band this size, there was room for the occasional banjo outing? Oh well, minor quibbles. As the songs gained in instrumental richness, they lost a little in terms of having our breath taken away by these snatches of lyrics for which I fell in swoon with Iron & Wine.
When I first heard Sam's voice warble "Those band-aid children chased your dog away" over the edge of a gorgeous 'Sunset Soon Forgotten' precipice, I was swept off my feet and haven't turned back. Dig a little deeper and such turns appear all over the place, but are harder and harder to find as the music does more and more of our thinking for us.
So here I am again, facing the same dilemma posed by Jason Molina a little way back. I cherish these troubled gents in their nakedly exposed solo mode, and humour them well enough when coddled by a band. They're enjoying it, it's where their path has taken them, and the choice is to get used to it or miss out on those moments of magic they can still deliver.
No comments:
Post a Comment