Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Iron and Wine has all the elements to be the next big hip band. It’s basically one guy (Sam Bream, though he does get a lot of help on this album), going by the moniker of a group, and he sings in a whispery, breathy way that feels very unsure at first listen. If that’s not a recipe for hipster adoration in 2008, I don’t know what is.

Just because the hipsters should like him, though, doesn’t mean he’s not awesome, because he is. It takes a few listens, but after a while you get beyond the maddening lack of confidence in the vocal style and hear its aesthetic effect as one of many instruments in his heavily layered, dense, and chilled-out but powerful songs.

Those layers also make this album more challenging than most you’ll encounter. “House By The Sea,” in particular, seems to obscure the main song with another one with an odd rhythm and heavily-plucked guitar on top of it. Like the vocals, though, the listener’s patience is rewarded by these well-composed and -orchestrated tracks, and soon you’ll hear how each layer contributes what now seems like an essential part of the sonic sea in which you’re happily drowning.

Elliott Smith has to be one of Bream’s main influences, as his vocals often veer toward falsetto, and the instrumentation, despite its layers, has an airy but claustrophobic emotional feel to it. The melancholy “Carousel” and “Resurrection Fern” makes me weak in the knees, makes my heart skip a beat, and makes me feel like crying, but the crying where you don’t know why you’re crying.

Bream’s lyrics are evocatively imagistic (that’s a word? I thought I was making it up) like Smith’s, but instead of the intensely personal, these are more like vignettes. Each song tells some kind of non-linear story made up of still shots from the characters’ interactions and thoughts. The best way to describe his lyrics is just to tell you that Bream is a film professor, and then let you imagine what kind of lyrics he would write. You’ll be close.

Given this album’s hippie roots and its hipster appeal, it really is phenomenal that it’s earned the title of my new favorite album.

Rating:

Mixers: “White Tooth Man,” “Carousel,” “Resurrection Fern,” “Boy With A Coin”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: International Pop Underground Convention and Iron Maiden (Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son)

Tags: 2007, 4.5 lunchboxes, CD reviews, music, new favorite album

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 3:28 pm and is filed under CD reviews, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.