If you've never seen Iron & Wine live, Sam Beam's following may come as a surprise. Everybody knows the Floridian sports a big old beard. It always seemed more rural South (or Lungfish, maybe) than something to inspire Deadheads to Volkswagen-surf, but watching dozens of kids hippie dancing to "On Your Wings" and "Jesus The Mexican Boy" can retroactively color Beam's output and those follicles: A "Cheeseburger In Paradise" whispers silently through "Someday The Waves," junkyard percussion becomes a drum circle in "Freedom Hangs Like Heaven," the evocative "fuck the man" graffiti in "The Trapeze Swinger" shifts into a bong-fisted slogan. In this framework, Shepherd's Dog is Iron & Wine's jam record: Sam?s stuff never sounded so big, so ready to shift into a 20-minute "Love And Some Verses." Outside of the punch line ?- hippie jokes aside, all due reverence in place -? Beam's created his most brilliant collection to date.
No doubt when Iron & Wine went electric on the Woman King EP a bit of the naked, one-guy-in-his-bedroom intimacy was lost. Shepherd's Dog welcomes an even fuller sound. Here, though, Beam's maintained an essential, muddy ambiance: No backward guitar fizzle, accordion, block percussion, piano, or incidental segments (pedal steel, brass, harmonica, synth notes/electro drums, and varieties of feedback stitching tracks together) can obscure his heart, or his poetry. Calexico add dub-like diminishes to "Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog)." The excellent "Pagan Angel And A Borrowed Car"' has an upbeat, full-band swing with a boogie piano and scissoring bows. In "Carousel" a crackhead builds a boat, dogs eat snow and Beam, singing through vibrato, sounds like Neil Young underwater. The shuffling, bluesy, organ-tinged "Lovesong Of The Buzzard" reminds us (in the fading afternoon) that "no one is the savior they would like to be" and finds"a tattoo of a flower on a broken wrist." In "House By The Sea" the protagonist's "been given to run with limp" and has been "changing the sound of [his] name."
Still, the most breathtakingly immediate tracks are those when the sound's most naked. In "Resurrection Fern," shaker and guitars accompanying Beam, a sing-song vocal line evokes a cornfield scene, a lifetime of "us," and a "fallen house across the way" with novelistic (or at least Carver-esque) detail: "We'll undress besides 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." Or, the accordion accented, falsetto-tinged finale "Flightless Bird, American Mouth," which traces a "quick wet boy / diving too deep for coins" to his post-fair existence as a "fat house cat / cursing [his] sore blunt tongue." The spare innocence-and-experience storyline functions as an epiphany much like Elliott Smith's "Say Yes" at the end of Either/Or, albeit with a jammier outro. It's no accident we're namedropping such a biggie, arguably Smith's best: Shepherd's Dog sounds like a bona fide classic.
The LP is out this September on Sub Pop.
