Iron & Wine – The Shepherd’s Dog

The last time we brought up Iron & Wine, I told a story about how I was really into the album Our Endless Numbered Days all the way up until I stumbled across a certain folk singer named Nick Drake. After hearing Nick’s songs and having my entire view of honesty in songwriting completely rearranged, suddenly Sam Beam’s beardy acoustic tunes, while still solid, seemed a bit lackluster.

Just in time for him to completely screw with the sound, eh?

Honestly though, readers, friends, this album is not bad. The fact that it’s praised universally by people who universally praise indie rock and use phrases like “songs you won’t hear on the radio that are ironically perfect for the radio” (paraphrased from all-music-dot-com, basically the Rolling Stones of not having to pay to read crappy reviews) and I’m actually not saying it’s bad, albeit through gritted teeth, should say something about the album.

Really though, I knew where folk entrepeneur Sam Beam was going to head with this particular album. Why? Because Myspace told me. Back when I used to the site, for some reason “he” friended me, and when I looked over the site, it was all stuff that seemed to be written by a promoter rather than Gandalf himself (for one, “he” used way too many exclamation points, and come on, does he sound like the kind of guy who would ever use an exclamation point?)

Anyway, having received some details about The Shepherd’s Dog, I knew not to expect it to be another Endless Numbered Days, but honestly, I should have seen the amount of “indie” that’s been thrown into this recording coming.

For one, there’s a “varied” sound at play here which means that all kinds of instruments are being thrown into the echoey mix in order to convince the listener that these aren’t just re-hashes of the previous album’s songs with added go-nowhere scales played on “obscure” instruments (that seem to get a lot of play nowadays for being so “obscure”, I guess that’s IRONIC huh?! HUH?!)

Seriously, to listen to the third song, “Lovesong Of The Buzzard“, you’re basically hearing “Sunset Soon Forgotten” from Endless Numbered Days with extra instruments thrown in. Go listen to both of those songs and tell me I’m wrong!

The other problem is with the go-to genres that this, like many “indie” albums, chooses to derive some jams from. For one, you’ve got the second track, “White Toothed Man”, which is kind of an Eastern influenced sound, and then you’ve got “Wolves (Other Title In Parentheses)” which is a reggae-inspired song. This is all well and good, but in fact you’ve still got Sam Beam whispering the vocals (usually with a second, even whispier Sam Beam harmonizing which turns the whole vocal project into this long line of melodic hiss), so you don’t really get the feeling that the borrowing of these stoner-favored musical styles are really producing the desired effect. Whispered Reggae just sounds like a hipster stoner battling against his own cultural identity, and less like the Reggae those of us of other levels of chemical enjoyment consider “Reggae”.

Thus, considering these rather major complaints that would kill any other album (especially since it’s already been injured by automatic acceptance into the indie community), I can not condemn this album. It would be like beating up a hipster, which is something we all want to do, but to take that step and actually break an emaciated, flaccid, bearded child over his six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon would be far less satisfying than it sounds.

Anyway, it’s hard to deny that the songs are catchy on this album, after all, he stole a lot of it from his other album, didn’t he? Worse crimes have been committed in music, I mean hell Motörhead puts out pretty much the same song every single time and you don’t see me complaining. Mind you, Lemmy could cook and eat me without thinking about it, and he’s probably on even better drugs than Sam Beam. Man, now my imagination’s starting to get away with me and I’m picture some crossover in styles between the two singers, man that is creepy and awesome.

So yes, the songs are catchy, the melodies solid and the addition of some other instruments, no matter how ho-hum, is at least enough to capture the attention of this fellow musician for over half of the album’s 49 minutes. After all, even though I knew this album wasn’t going to be as good as the album I used to adore, I still went out and bought it on the good faith that it would provide some dark, mellow music for me to relax to. Turns out I am just fine relaxing with hand-claps and sitars as well as acoustic guitar, and the nice thing is that roughly 40% of the album is still little more than Sam and a guitar, so the sound is not so far gone.

Finally, loathe as I am to accept any part of hipster culture, I will admit that the oft-pretentious, acoustic drudgery that occurs within its circles is technically better than anything on the mellow side of the musical spectrum nowadays. We’ll never have Country music like we used to, and we’ll never have Folk music like we used to, for the mere fact that both of those styles and their plain-spoken poetry died with a generation that didn’t have Myspace pages written by promoters speaking from the mouths of glossy .jpeg’s of the artists you think have it all figured out but, like you or me, are just in it to make a buck. No, acoustic instruments might still be en vogue and even the folkier “obscure” instruments might be the ****IRONIC**** tools of “modern” music, but the simple lifestyle that bore some of the best music to ever be created by white people (and seriously white people do not have a lot going for us in that historical context) is now behind us, and so whispery, bearded songsters like Sam Beam and Iron & Wine are all that our children have to look back on once they finally destroy Johnny Cash’s back catalogue by converting it to hip-hop. But that’s a whole other diatribe that we’ll probably be too disgusted to bring up here again on Album Du Jour.

The point is, it may not be folk like your folks liked folk, but it’s close enough for folk, so you might as well folk your eyes out.

Iron And Wine – Our Endless Numbered Days

So I just picked up a very loud and dangerous re-issue of the Zip Code Rapists‘ album, and I can’t wait to listen to it, but for now I am awaiting a new pair of headphones to arrive in the mail, as my ultra-expensive Shure SE530′s are all but shot right now. It’s sad when you can spend $500 or more on a pair of headphones that don’t even last inside a year, but hopefully they’ll fix the buggers good as new and we can all get on with our lives.

Until then, I only have the massive at-home headphones to listen to things through, and today they will be piping the lethargic tones of torpor & hebetude, I mean Iron & Wine:

Back before I found out (though I always suspected) that this sort of flaccid acoustic nonsense was trendy, and long before I had the pleasure of hearing the real deals of poetic, acoustic folk music (Nick Drake, old Leonard Cohen, to name a couple), I was asking friends for recommendations on some good, calm acoustic music. One of my friends recommended this beardy fellow who goes by the band name of “Iron & Wine” even though his name is the marketable-enough Samuel Beam.

The song I was given for approval is the album’s centerpiece, a track called “Free Until They Cut Me Down”, a really mellow bluesy number that has some really interesting harmony work, a casual visit from an actual rhythm section, and some interesting if not totally pedestrian banjo riffing. The whole thing is 6 minutes long and I fell in love with it instantly.

So, I went out and purchased the album, listened to it on some new headphones of mine, the first nice headphones I ever owned, a pair of Bose Triports, lost unfortunately in shipping back from the company when I broke them because they are held together with bubblegum wrappers. Well, at the time, these newly-acquired headphones could convey acoustics in a way I hadn’t previously heard from headphones, and this whole album was an absolute joy to listen to.

In fact, it still is, but I am of the opinion now (especially after hearing the follow up Shepherd’s Dog) that this album might just be a one-off collection of good-if-not-formulaic songs that utilize some fairly standard chord progressions and Samuel’s maddeningly whispery vocals singing about God and death a lot. The guy’s not too interested in keeping the pleasing, mellow acoustic vibe as much as he is in keeping it within the trends of today, which is to throw as much reverb on everything as possible and drop in as many weird instruments as possible, all while cutting out the corners of really utilizing them correctly. Whoops started a tangent there.

The album starts off promisingly enough with another fair-weather-rhythm-section supported track “On Your Wings”, which is a song about God that has an interesting minor acoustic riff that is held throughout the entire song. This is followed up by the tight fingerpicking folk song about dying called “Naked As We Came”.

Next we have a song that’s about ???? called “Cinder And Smoke”, which brings the mellow meter almost up to a coma, and has some relaxing percussive playfulness to compliment the very simplistic finger-picking. The main feature though would have to be the harmonic “ahhhhhs” that stretch for many measures. If you stay awake through this song, however, you might be jolted awake by the really sharply mixed “Sunset Soon Forgotten”, which is an ok song that I seem to remember being about death, but I often wonder why the guitar is so much more up-front and loudly mixed amidst everything else in this track and almost no others? It is a mystery.

Another riffy, rhythmic number is “Teeth In The Grass”, which I enjoy despite hating the lyrics. There is no real sense behind the phrase “there will be teeth in the grass” and thus no real need to repeat it 5 times in every stanza. Oh well, that’s folk music for you, right folks?

Then we have “Love And Some Verses”, which has a gorgeous main melody if I do say so. This melody is joined by a harmony just in time for the lyrics to get ridiculous (“May I be weaved in your hair?”) There is an interesting little shuffle rhythm that comes in to join for the rest of the song, but it’s quite subtle.

Then we have the autoharp-based tune (I think that’s an autoharp anyway) of “Radio War”. It’s atrocious. I have nothing against autoharps, except to say that there is a right way and a wrong way to record them. See, they are very tinny because you pluck them with basically a quill or a fingernail, and the strings are tiny so the sound works as a rhythm device (see The Carter Family for correct ways to use an autoharp), but if you are recording it with modern equipment, for goodness’ sakes, please do not mix it as loud as it will go. The other problem I have with this song is that it musically keeps meandering around 4th and 5th chords, and never visits the actual root chord, thus the song’s melody has no actual foundation and this kills me as someone who can listen to a song and see the structure of it, especially when that structure is toppling over because there’s nothing holding it up.

Still, most modern MP3 players are equipped with a “skip” button, and just one push of the magical “next” will bring us to the best song on the album. It’s called “Each Coming Night”, and is a very simple chord progression (one of the simplest, root, minor fall, scale down to 4th and then 5th, repeat), but the lyrics are actually good in this one despite being about death, and the melody really sticks with you. I also quite enjoy the humming/banjo melody that comes in about half-way through. People have spent 3 minutes in worse ways.

After “Free Until They Cut Me Down” is a series of songs designed to make sure that you forget this album ever got exciting for a moment. First, there’s “Fever Dream” which is nearly 6 minutes of who cares, and then Sodom, South George, which is about death and is 7 minutes long. Finally, “Passing Afternoon”, which is actually very good, but by the time you get to it you might feel like you too have spent endless numbered days listening to this album. Or, if you’re like me, and you need something to show off how cool your headphones are when it comes to making acoustic guitars sound great, this album will assist quite well.

I can’t wait for those headphones!