Tending To The Flock

Iron and Wine - The Shepherd's Dog

Perhaps I’ve waxed lyrical about Iron and Wine more than enough on these pages already but I can’t help feeling that ‘The Shepherd’s Dog’ deserves special attention as the first Iron and Wine album to explore the full possibilities of an ensemble sound. Most likely inspired by the outstanding collaboration with Calexico from a couple of years ago (indeed, Joey Burns and Paul Niehaus from that wonderful group both appear here), Sam Beam has now delivered rich and inventive arrangements to match his deeply compelling songs.

Lyrically, Beam continues to look like a true original and a master of language. His images are at once elusive and pure (‘love was a promise made of smoke in a frozen copse of trees’) and he has a peculiar knack for unusual juxtapositions (‘Cain got a milk eyed mule from the auction, Abel got a telephone’ or ‘springtime and the promise of an open fist’). Somehow, these words always seem to flow softly and elegantly (no doubt Beam’s beautifully understated delivery helps in this regard) and always evoke feelings rather than obscuring them.

Those who, like me, deeply admire Beam’s talent for composing ballads in the true sense of the term – long, storytelling songs with languid melodies – may be disappointed that his masterful song ‘The Trapeze Swinger’ is rarely used as a template here. There is the gorgeous ‘Resurrection Fern’, which closely resembles that song, albeit in far more concise form. Its chorus is almost unspeakably beautiful (‘we’ll undress beside the ashes of the fire/both our tender bellies wrapped around in bailing wire/all the more an underwater pearl than the oak tree and its resurrection fern’), bolstered by Paul Niehaus’ subtle but stirring pedal steel. The closing ‘Flightless Bird, American Mouth’ also has something of a soulful lilt to it, and is characteristically tender and affecting.

For most of ‘The Shepherd’s Dog’, though, Beam explores the more rhythmically driven, bluesy aspects of his work, to increasingly powerful effect. I think I credited Beam with pioneering something approaching an ‘American folk minimalism. This felt like a neat categorisation at the time but now seems hopelessly inadequate. ‘The Shepherd’s Dog’ is Beam’s most brazenly percussive work to date, both in terms of its deployment of a range of percussion instruments (but never a conventional drum kit) and in the style of guitar playing Beam deploys throughout. As a result, ‘The Shepherd’s Dog’ achieves much in retracing some of the lost connections between Appalachian blues and African desert music. ‘House By The Sea’ sounds closer to Ali Farka Toure than Bob Dylan (albeit with a hint of Roger McGuinn in the guitar solos), and there are echoes of the repetitive, hypnotic grooves of the Touareg masters Tinariwen, particularly on ‘Wolves (Song of the Shepherd’s Dog)’ or first single ‘Boy With A Coin’.

Somehow I hadn’t quite latched on to just how many of these songs Beam performed at his special show at the Spitz a couple of months ago. As a result many of the melodies and lyrical ideas already seem recognisable, but the overall sound of the record is somewhat unexpected and fascinating. This makes for an enchanting combination of distance and familiarity. There are all manner of sounds that seem alien to the trademark Iron and Wine sound – cello, soulful Wurlitzer, scratchy guitars, the delightful honky tonk piano on ‘The Devil Never Sleeps’, perhaps what might even be the odd intervention of electronics. The deep connection with the blues is still at the heart of this music, but the feel is now less rustic and more elastic.

Beam is an extraordinary songwriter capable of vivid, dreamlike songs that conjure their own weird combination of romanticism and danger. He would still be a significant artist even were he content to continue simply as an acoustic troubadour. That he has found new contexts for his elegiac words and melodies makes hiw work all the more expressive and powerful.

Ghosts in the Machine

PJ Harvey's 'White Chalk'

PJ Harvey clearly has little care for continuity. With each new album, she has reinvented herself. She indulged her fiery rage and righteous hatred on ‘Rid Of Me’, explored erotic mysteries on ‘To Bring You My Love’ and ‘Is This Desire?’, ventured into relatively conventional rock terrain for the Mercury winning ‘Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea’ and vented uncomplicated aggression on ‘Uh Huh Her’. Her latest venture, ‘White Chalk’, may well represent her most audacious transformation yet. It’s certainly the least commercial record she’s made in some time, in a career where commercial concerns rarely, if ever, seem to have been a significant factor.

At just 36 minutes long, one might be forgiven for inserting it into a CD player and expecting a set of snappy pop songs. Polly Harvey rarely takes such a comfortable route though of course. ‘White Chalk’ is in fact as confrontational and austere a record as I’ve heard this year. The majority of these songs were composed at the piano, and feature Polly pushing, occasionally straining, into the upper reaches of her vocal register. Formally trained pianists may wish to turn away now, for Polly is undoubtedly something of a novice at the old ivories, and much of the touch here is rather plinky-plonk.

There is, however, something eerily appropriate about this approach, particularly in the way it has directed Harvey towards a kind of chamber-noir sound. For much of ‘White Chalk’, Polly seems to be revelling in nostalgia for old lands, old times and a child’s loss of innocence. This being a PJ Harvey album though, it’s not the heart-warming, or even the melancholy form of nostalgic reverie. There’s a simmering malice and macabre chill throughout ‘White Chalk’ that creates unresolved tensions of the most cloying and uncomfortable kind. The skeletal piano and Yoko Ono-esque vocals serve to heighten and emphasise this discomfort.

The wonderful ‘Silence’, perhaps the album’s best track, begins ‘All those places where I recall/The memories that gripped me and pinned me down’. It sets the scene for the intense drama that plays out in the rest of the song, and also neatly summarises the album’s distinctive themes. Memory here has an inevitable, unavoidable force but is also stifling and disconcerting.

Both the title track and ‘Grow Grow Grow’ seem to revisit childhood. The latter is clearly an exploration of burgeoning child sexuality (‘Teach me Mummy how to grow, how to catch someone’s fancy beneath the twisted oak grove’), delivered almost as a fairytale. There are echoes of Angela Carter’s ‘The Company of Wolves’ here, with its Freudian take on the Little Red Riding Hood story. ‘White Chalk’ itself is one of the more immediately appealing songs in this set, and one of the few to favour the rustle of an acoustic guitar over the more weighty backing of the piano. Harvey sings of ‘white chalk, sticking to my shoes, playing as a child with you’ and, rather more chillingly, claims that ‘these chalk hills will rot my bones’. There’s a majestic flow to the song that builds as it progresses.

Elsewhere, there’s an unrestrained longing that frequently boils over into desperation, from the malevolent cry at the heart of ‘The Devil’ (‘Come! Come! Come here at once!’) to the burning desire of ‘The Piano’. Much of this is reinforced by the stately yet quietly terrifying arrangements of these songs, from vivid vocal harmonies to soft, rustling percussion. Nick Cave’s ‘The Boatman’s Call’ has been cited as an obvious reference point, but where that album largely saw Cave abandon his trademark menace for more spiritual and romantic concerns, ‘White Chalk’ is as unsettling and troubling a record as Harvey has yet produced. Similarly, comparisons with Tori Amos and Kate Bush are largely unhelpful. There is mercifully nothing of Amos’ forced kookiness here, and if ‘White Chalk’ echoes some of Bush’s recent preoccupations with nature, that is only in the propensity of the natural world to evoke feeling and prompt memory. ‘White Chalk’ occupies its own peculiar space – a world that is creepy and bleak but thoroughly bewitching. On the surface, it’s completely uninviting, but ultimately it’s irresistibly tempting.