The Shepherd's Dog

I was cautious when I was listening to this for the first time. Being a 'fan' of music is an awful thing, especially if you're half-intelligent like me and lots of other human beings. Because you start to get world-weary and you sometimes get cynical. Smart people like us are funny though, because even we can be rendered silly and confused, like little simple boys picking our noses with open-mouths, gawking into the distance with a moronic-flavour to our directionless gaze. We can be rendered thus by effective art. Such was my idiotic state when the strange new sounds of this LP were playing in my ears for the first time. I was half pessimistic, half confused. I thought, "Oh so he's really consciously trying NOT to be sweet." You see, all the vocal melodies don't seem quite as delightful as on his previous work, they take dark or sinister turns in their progressions, (even if the timbre of Mr. Beam's voice remains recognizable as ever) he even uses effects and techniques to colour the personality of the voice in a different way. So it is conscious. Also, I always get suspicious when there is one 'dub' track on an album by people who don't really do dub music. Becauses I love dub music, and again with the cycnicism, I don't like the idea that musicians 'take a bit of dub for themselves' just because dub is seen as cool or hip. That can sometimes seem like a rape, like pop music raped rapping in the 80's and early 90's. Rapers delight.

But, you know what? All of that is nonsense. IT'S NONSENSE! Musicians do not think like that, the good ones don't anyway, real musicians don't think like fans, or crafty manipulators of stereotypes and abusers of musical credability. So my initial listen and those partially formed vibrations (for they weren't as solid as thoughts yet) that I've just typed up are nothing to go on really. So, this album was certainly very different, but when I thought it through, that made perfect sense. Back in the intervening years since my friend first introduced me to their amazing album, 'Our Endless Numbered Days', I often wondered, after getting so into it, what they might possibly do for their next LP. I strongly felt that as amazing and wonderul an album as it was- there was just no sweeter and delicate that they, that Sam Beam, could be. His voice just couldn't get any more sweeter in that same way, that soul and those words couldn't be as perfectly refined as they were on that album. Not again.

And so, with time, I have grown to understand that not only is the more rugged, musically dynamic sound I hear on 'The Shepherd's Dog' quite necessary for the bands continuing relevance, it is also not a forced/unnatural musical reaction to their previous work, or if it is, that's not what defines it. It's just something quite different. Does it work? I don't know. For the most part though, I like this album. The lyrics seem harder for me to follow, and indeed, I still can't quite remember any lines from the album after listening to it for almost a month- but the feel, the feel and aura of the work has never been as prominent with Iron and Wine as it is here (I haven't heard the Calexico collaboration album, so I may be wrong). The texture dammit, the texture is strong and vital, like perfectly large drops of rich blood falling down cascading and floating spiral staircases of white silk, all falling diagonally. Sometimes there's a black snake too. You can hear the black snake in the bass guitar and in the general sweat of what is, for me, the best track, 'House by the Sea'. Initially I loved the music, I still do, but the more I paid attention to the lyrics the more I feel that Mr. Beam is writing and singing in the same way that I write a lot of my poetry and short-stories. He's speaking with this kind of simple insistence on this vision, stating it so plainly, "There is a house by the sea..." by implication of this assertion I feel that he is asking the listener to envisage it. And I do, I envisage this house with a very light blue dome, alone and isolated on a grey overcast day, still bright somehow. Like so much of his stuff, it's great poetry, but the music! The music!

I want Mr. Beam to continue exploding, I want him to get wilder and rocket off wilder and higher. He has earned the respect of a lot of lovely thoughtful people, and of course all of the clever idiots and many in between, by doing what he's done on this album. He's shown he's a few steps ahead. He must keep on treading in this turf, he's so gifted, he must not stop! MUSTN'T! As musicians I feel we are sometimes granted the luxury of a few moments of beauty and sentimentality such as we hear on 'Resurrection Fern' (and on the entire album of 'Our Endless Numbered Days') but whilst that stuff can beautify the world, at this point, listeners familiar who embrace this new sound will be aware that that particular song is somewhat of a re-treading of musical ground ('The Trapeze Swinger' if you want to pin it down to one song!) But no. No, my friends. Iron & Wine have now pushed the baby out beyond a certain point of no return. They cannot sit back and remenisce about how much fun it was to be pregnant all those 9 months, now the baby is really coming out, and they have to continue pushing, pushing forwards, just as they have begun doing on this album. And so it rests upon moments like the vocal phaser on 'Carousel', the crackle-thunder-knowing darkness-dream sound of 'Peace Beneathe the City', the undeniable groove of the the title track, to electrify and inspire us in the very highest ways possible.

I love art. I love what this album stands for. Mr. Beam's poetry is beautiful and is a gift that will keep keeping on, but his musical statements are what will make him stand up as real and timeless in the world of music. It's trendy for music-writers to swear these days, but I'm in the holy month of Ramadhan and I don't feel like using vulgar language. Nonetheless, in previous days I might well have replaced the 'forget' in the following sentence with another far more more forceful word to demonstrate to you the sheer power this music stirs within me. Forget fans, bigger pictures, writers and absolutely everything else other than the music- this album is great.