Since I drive the back roads of the county at wee morning hours, I have been craving something contemplative and lovely... and thus began my current obsession with Iron and Wine. I can't stop listening to Our Endless Numbered Days. I love the Calexico collaboration, In the Reins. The melancholy steadiness of that EP runs through my veins like a throbbing caffeine substitute... how strange to find clarity and awareness in what is essentially contemplative. In the past, I woke to the screams of Frank Black or the tongue twisting lyrical imperative of Steven Malkmus.
Somehow the gentle lullaby of Sam Beam permeates my darkened car and calls out the morning from the inevitable mist. Yawn. Coming awake in a quiet consciousness.
And so I picked up Shepherd's Dog this weekend...
Still listening, still absorbing... the groove of sound is very similar and yet wildly more layered, more intricate.
I love this album as a whole entity: Each song leads into the next, building and creating a contemplative mood. "Carousel" hearkens back, sound wise, to Our Endless Numbered Days. "House by the Sea" is a steady building groove that details some Odysseus-like lover's triangle.
My favorite tracks are "Resurrection Fern" and "Flightless Bird, American Mouth." In the first, Beam weaves a melancholy story of two lovers, their lives apparently dried up and dead, living like ghosts...but underneath the outward appearance is the promise of resurrection, the unfurling of life returned.
"In our days we will live like our ghosts will live/pitching glass at the cornfield crows and folding clothes(....)" And we’ll undress beside the ashes of the fire/Both our tender bellies wound in baling wire/All the more a pair of underwater pearls/Than the oak tree and its resurrection fern"
"Flightless Bird, American Mouth" has a soaring quality that brings a catch to my throat no matter how often I hear it... just lovely. The progression of the music carries it from a quiet, introspective start into a blossoming ballad, the lyrics underlined by the instruments. It's the perfect closing song; cryptic, longing, and melodic. Sigh. I could listen to Sam Beam breathe (ala "Cinder and Smoke") and be happy.
Now I’m a fat house cat/Cursing my sore blunt tongue / Watching the warm poison rats/ Curl through the wide white fence cracks/ Kissing on magazine photos/ Those fishing lures thrown in the cold and clean/ Blood of Christ mountain stream/ Have I found you?/ Flightless bird, brown hair bleeding / Or lost you? / American mouth/ Big bill, stuck going down
(lyrics from www.sing365.com)
4 comments:
I have a lot of Iron & Wine albums (most given to me by friends), but for some reason I can't get into it. Something about the whispery vocals that seem to lull me to sleep. If I listened to that on the way to work, it would be instant death via ditch.
That being said, I can understand why others love them. I did really like their cover of Postal Service's "Such Great Heights."
Is that the one you gave me to sample? I liked it, but I second the sleepy feeling. Or maybe it is just that I'm always sleepy, since I seem have some child or two in my bed for some portion of the night.
Maybe it's reverse psychology, but it puts me into a contemplative state. Ken: what do you listen to in the mornings?
L: Isn't nighttime musical kids SO MUCH FUN?!!
Let's face it. I am a nerd. I listen to the BBC every morning. Somehow listening to the news engages my brain and keeps me awake.
On long distance trips, I listen to a combination of rawk (Pixies, British Sea Power, Ramones - something I can scream along to), news or This American Life and sports. If there's a football or basketball game on that I care about, that's all I really need, actually.
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