Iron And Wine preview

Iron And Wine
Metro, Chicago
Sunday, September 23, 2007

Ssshhhhhh . . . Iron And Wine is trying to be louder.

Iron And Wine’s expanded sound on its most recent release, The Shepherd’s Dog (Sub Pop), will undoubtedly take some listeners by surprise, but it shouldn’t. Retrace Iron And Wine and its mastermind Sam Beam’s discography, and you’ll find this to be natural progression. Their debut, 2002’s The Creek Drank The Cradle, and follow-up EP, The Sea & Rhythm, were bare-as-bare-bones-could-be lo-fi gems, Beam alone in his Miami home studio putting ideas to cassette tape. Our Endless Numbered Days arrived in 2004 and Iron And Wine started to become a band, not a solo project, thanks to fuller instrumentation, but that album still closely followed the blueprints laid out by its predecessors.

A year later Iron And Wine released the Woman King EP, and Beam’s bigger plans were clear. Though only six songs long, Woman King broke the predominately acoustic guitar-and-banjo mold of everything before it, and by the time Beam and co. got around to collaborating with Calexico later that year on In The Reins (all songs penned by Beam), they were sounding pretty comfortable as a real-life group. Though Beam’s voice still never raises above a hush, Shepherd’s Dog is the most adventurous Iron And Wine record yet, featuring an eight-piece outfit counting Beam himself (but excluding guest performances from the likes of Calexico’s Joey Burns and Paul Niehaus among others), fully-fleshed rhythm, actual grooves, increased production value (produced by Brian Deck), and check out the handclap hook on “Boy With A Coin”! Beam did recently leave the palms and glitz of Florida for the tumbleweed and grit of Texas – maybe he really took that whole “everything’s bigger in Texas thing” to heart.

Arthur & Yu open.

– Trevor Fisher

Click here to download Iron And Wine’s “Boy With A Coin.”

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly