Plumbiferous Media

Austin indie band Shearwater’s last album, Rook, was our 2008 top album, and deservedly so. Now, almost two years later, Shearwater’s put out their newest album, The Golden Arch­i­pel­ago. Even though it will nat­u­rally be com­pared to such an excel­lent album, The Golden Arch­i­pel­ago stands up well, com­bin­ing the gor­geous musi­cal detail that lies at the core of Shearwater’s music with a new shift towards more typ­i­cal rock dynam­ics. It’s not quite the mas­ter­piece that Rook was, but it’s still very good.

From a purely instru­men­tal stand­point, The Golden Arch­i­pel­ago is just as mas­ter­ful as its pre­de­ces­sor, and in some cases, like the first cou­ple tracks, the two albums are fright­en­ingly sim­i­lar. Direct com­par­isons aside, Shear­wa­ter pays very close atten­tion to both the minute details and the larger con­cepts and sec­tions. The low strings of “Merid­ian” and the tremolo of “God Made Me” are excel­lent addi­tions that sub­tly shape the track, but “God Made Me” also has one of the best larger tran­si­tions, about two thirds of the way through, of the entire album. All together, the musi­cal deci­sions on The Golden Arch­i­pel­ago suc­ceed more than a few times at leav­ing mouths gaping.

The Golden Arch­i­pel­ago also has a nice level of diver­sity. While a few tracks towards the end tend to blend together, the vast major­ity of the tracks remain their own unique expe­ri­ence. Some­times this can get slightly odd; the rau­cous per­cus­sion of “Land­scape at Speed” works counter to the oth­er­wise relaxed track. But for the most part, diver­sity is a highly wel­come ele­ment, given the nar­row­ness of the niche genre Shear­wa­ter have hap­pily invented for themselves.

Jonathan Meiburg’s vocals are as beau­ti­fully done on The Golden Arch­i­pel­ago as we’ve come to expect from him, soft and sub­tly pow­er­ful in a way that infuses Shearwater’s music with energy. Meiburg’s voice is at the same time a reli­ably con­stant ele­ment of the music (and an always excel­lent one) and one which is fully capa­ble of effort­lessly defin­ing the direc­tion of the music. In this way, Meiburg sings the vivid images of The Golden Arch­i­pel­ago, his voice an essen­tial part of the expertly formed sound.

The birds fly­ing through the organic land­scape cre­ated by Shear­wa­ter are as appro­pri­ate as ever for a band named after a seabird - and as majes­tic and poet­i­cally illus­trated as pos­si­ble. When Meiburg sings of “effort­less gulls in the wake” on the album’s final track, it’s impos­si­ble not to imag­ine the scene he’s cre­ated, the mix­ture of nature as rep­re­sented by the gulls and “the vio­lent surg­ing of life.” As “Black Eyes” urges the lis­tener to “Come down from the lion’s back / Call down to the end­less sleep­ers / Give life to the dim­ming days / That run in an end­less stream now,” the track builds, inten­si­fy­ing the already strik­ing image. The Golden Arch­i­pel­ago, filled to the brim with sim­i­lar images, is noth­ing less than pow­er­ful and resonant.

Rook was a defin­ing moment for Shear­wa­ter. Sig­nif­i­cantly cleaner and more focused than much of Shear­wa­ter, or it’s par­ent band Okkervil River’s pre­vi­ous works, Rook cre­ated an entire new area for Shear­wa­ter to explore, and The Golden Arch­i­pel­ago read­ily engages in this explo­ration. While its sound is not as new as Rook’s, it’s fur­ther devel­oped, and still extremely inter­est­ing. It has lost some power, opt­ing instead for care­ful musi­cal­ity, but this trade­off seems to have worked well for Shear­wa­ter, now able to claim yet another success.

This post is tagged 80-89, Shearwater