CD Review: Shearwater - Palo Santo

"There's no more canaries in the mine." This line, howled during the song "White Waves," sets the tone for Shearwater's album Palo Santo. Swinging from low-key folk to raucous rock, the album comes from a moody and rustic place. It conjures up visions of wild-growing grasses and rusted-out factories - a place where hope is tamped down and there's little left to do but murmur at the firmament and bellow songs at the indifferent sky.

Shearwater started as a side project for Will Sheff and Jonathan Meiburg, both of the prolific and acclaimed folk-rock band Okkervil River. Sheff still plays in Shearwater, but it's since become Meiburg's baby, and Palo Santo (the band's fourth full-length album) sees him handling songwriting and singing duties by himself for the first time. He tackles this increase in responsibility like a man with something to prove, and the results are often intoxicating.

Meiburg demonstrates his taste for both the quiet and the loud sides of his muse right away in the album's first track, "La Dame et la Licorne." It starts as a stark, nearly a cappella ballad (only the drifting notes of a lonely piano and the whirr of some unnamed electronic device back him); at about the minute mark, though, Meiburg screams out the line "Bring back my boy!" The rest of the song is still low-key, a mournful tune supported by piano and violin, but the unexpected vocal eruption - the discombobulating perfect shift from a warble to a holler - keys the listener to expect more discordant material.

The rest of Palo Santo provides a nice balance between the rollicking and the contemplative. So "Licorne" is followed by the stomping "Red Sea, Black Sea." The gorgeous title track is sandwiched in between two rockers, "White Waves" and "Seventy-Four, Seventy-Five." The organ-flecked revival-tent slowburn stunner "Hail, Mary" (the album's high point) collapses and gets swept away by the mellow epilogue "Going is Song." I give Meiburg this: He knows how to pace an album and sustain a mood.

The tonal shifts of Palo Santo require musicians who can be comfortable in both fast and slow modes; fortunately, the personnel in Shearwater are up to whatever tasks given them. Meiburg's voice, as evinced at the opening of the album, is elastic enough to bring out both melancholy and defiance. Furthermore, he and Howard Draper are multi-instrumentalists, so one never knows what will pop up. The violin on "La Dame et la Licorne" shows up on a couple other tracks, notably at the end of "Failed Queen," where its squeaky timbre provides an interesting literalization of the title subject.

Too, the laid-back piano on "Licorne" becomes significantly more violent on the propulsive "Seventy-Four, Seventy-Five." And then there's Thor Harris's percussion. He ranges from subdued timekeeping on "Sing, Little Birdie" to powerful pounding on "Johnny Viola." These back-to-back tracks, with their faded trumpet licks and recessed vocals, suggest a suite from a long-lost spaghetti Western.

The Western parallel is apt, as the mood is a mix of sun-blasted landscapes and frigid starless nights. Palo Santo shows us a place where both the lips and the heart of the wandering troubadour are cracked and bleeding. The world to which Meiburg and Shearwater bring us is a dark and haunted one, but it's also quite lovely. "Turn your transmitters on, we are not coming back," he intones in "Red Sea, Black Sea." The question is, will you want to come back?

Article Author: Steve Carlson

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.

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