Shear Heart Attack
Okkervil River offshoot makes its bid for independence.
Shearwater’s 2004 album, Winged Life, was a candle fighting ever so courageously against the breeze, seemingly extinguished one second and in full, emblazened regalia the next. But Palo Santo, disregarding the Calexico-ish “Seventy-Four, Seventy-Five,” is as desperate as its predcessor was delicate. Jonathan Meiburg’s assumption of the Shearwater scepter has actually drawn the band closer to the Okkervil River from which it sprang, mirroring the home project’s heightened, emotional fragility in the torturous electro of “Red Sea, Black Sea” and the pounded “Johnny Viola.” “Sing, Little Birdie” sends a rope back over the ravine to the past, but it seems a token gesture — this limb has been severed, almost literally.
— Steve Forstneger
Click here to download “Seventy-Four, Seventy-Five.”
