| Shearwater - Rook |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Monday, June 23, 2008 at 09:21 AM | |
 ShearwaterRook Matador shearwatermusic.com One of the complicating things about bands is that they're often more or less steered by one person—usually the principal songwriter, who's often the singer—and that thus the band becomes a surrogate for personal whims and trends. The band must endure the fluctuations of interest that lead musicians through acoustic periods, Eastern European gypsy periods, minimalist periods, and so on and so forth until a band's catalog can look as messy and incoherent as any average life. Radiohead could be taken as a good example here—even though Thom Yorke isn't exactly that band's bellwether—in the sense that their records seem less like careful exploration than weighty dialogues about what it means to be a band. This is why side projects can often kick so much ass. There's a lot to be said for a musician following a single impulse monomaniacally in a form which is less central to his or her own sense of self. Thus did Shearwater begin in 1999 as a quieter outlet for Okkervil River's Will Sheff and Jonathan Meiburg. Since then, Sheff has turned to Okkervil River full-time, leaving Meiburg to carefully guide Shearwater to the current apex of its bird-themed flightpath with Rook. If I had to pick one word to describe Rook, it would be dramatic, falling as it does in the line of everything from David Bowie's '70s stuff to Jeremy Enigk's increasingly meticulous solo work. It falls just shy of bombastic, because nothing on the record feels overblown, but it's also thickly layered and carefully worked out. The overwhelming sense of the record's short 35-minute running time is that nothing has been wasted here. Meiburg's bird fixation is the jumping off point (a shearwater is a medium-sized sea bird, and all manner of avian species turn up on the album, from the titular rook to the sparrow), and from that singular thematic idea, he builds positively towering songs around his carefully articulated and sorrowful voice, which recalls Antony Hegarty's of Antony and the Johnsons. The music here is almost preternaturally beautiful, from the drumless but nevertheless insistent "Leviathan, Bound" to the delicate interplay of woodwinds and strings on "Home Life" to "I Was A Cloud," with its softly finger-picked acoustic guitar and distant falsetto chorus that recalls no one so much as Bon Iver's Justin Vernon. Balancing that limpid beauty is the resolute and desperate tone of the heavier numbers like "The Snow Leopard," which builds steadily towards a giant finale, and "Century Eyes," which clocks in at a lean and focused two-and-a-half minutes. As a whole, the record is a staggeringly well-paced and deliberate piece, and it hold forth the promise of greater and greater rewards with multiple listens. The imagery of the songs seems loosely bound together, creating the kind of through-composed mythology that leads you further and further into an album. Each year, it seems like there are one or two albums that are so thoroughly crafted that they create worlds of their own, and by the end of the year, they're inevitably some of the most critically acclaimed: Grizzly Bear's Yellow House, Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago, etc. The place of Shearwater's Rook in that highly-esteemed company come year's end seems virtually guaranteed. Stream "The Snow Leopard" below: COMING UP: Shearwater with The Haves Have It on Wednesday, June 25. Seventh St. Entry. $8. 8pm. 18+. |
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