Archive Series Volume No. 1
by Iron & Wine
Release Date: February 24th 2015
Tracklist: Slow Black River / The Wind Is Low / Eden / Two Hungry Blackbirds / Freckled Girl / Judgement / Sing Song Bird / Beyond The Fence / Quarters In A Pocket / Loretta / Everyone's Summer of '95 / Minor Piano Key / Your Sly Smile / Halfway To Richmond / Wade Across The Water / Postcard //
I've been listening to Iron & Wine for
a while now, but only really started properly listening to all of his music
this year. The first album I listened to was Our Endless Numbered Days a
brilliant album that is on my list to write about. Our Endless Numbered
Days is similar in style to this album, Archive Series
Volume No. 1, where it is generally focused on his (Sam Beam's) voice and guitar and there is still this level of
intimacy that he creates within his music through the context and lyrics of his
work. Even though Our Endless Numbered Days has a larger
instrumental texture within the songs and are cleaner recordings. Archive
Series Volume No. 1 is an archive of 16 home recordings that were
written and recorded in the late ‘90s and early 00’s. This is a companion to
his debut album The Creek Drank The Cradle in 2002.
Due to the setting and style of the
recordings, you get this roomy ambience in the tracks. This ambience is evident
straight away from the opening track Slow Black River, where this
addition of the background noise from the surrounding room is within the texture
of the track. The lo-fi production gives one height of sound, one overall depth;
everything within the track, his voice and guitar, are at one level – his voice feels no closer to the front of the sound than his guitar
does. This album goes back to Sam Beam’s
style of just him and his intricate guitar playing. The album is stripped down
in texture solely to his voice and guitar, while the guitar part feels as though it has many lines within.
As the recordings are less clean than that of digital recordings, there are more
inflections throughout the sonorities and a raw-er universal sound. This method of
recording demonstrates how his music differs and how elements change the
atmospherics and intimacy within his work. As this album feels less digitally
clean it increases the level of intimacy against his lyrics, “If I could be over you when the sky starts
falling, / would you be happy under me?”
All of these characteristics are a
reminder of The Creek Drank The Cradle,
they give a familiarity but also show how he’s progressed and evolved his sound
compared to his other releases between his debut album and this new release.
From Beam’s perspective, “it seems like there's been
enough time so that it sounds significantly different than what I've been doing
these past few years,” and that’s true. It’s significantly different to his
2013 release, Ghost On Ghost, where it travels back to his sound at the beginning of his career.
“Lost
my watch, watch and chain / but time’s not lost / this time we walk together
beside the slow black river”, the introduction to the opener of the first
volume to this archival series fits perfectly as time hasn’t been lost from
these recordings. As Beam put it, “it feels more like a time capsule or a diary
entry.”
Slow Black River is a strong open to this album demonstrating, once again,
the strength of his lyricism: “Lost my
watch, watch and chain, to her today / but time it has no meaning / when her
and me are walking”. The minimalist intricacies of his strumming is evident
in all respects of this series of songs. The slower paced songs, such as Two
Hungry Blackbirds, have this sense of perseverance throughout the
guitar parts although at the same time are serene and calm with the help and
accompaniment of his voice.
Two Hungry Blackbirds is currently
one of my favourite tracks on the album. However calm and content it feels, it
evokes this ambiguity of the perception of the emotions portrayed, feeling
melancholic with lines of text such as, “Spoke
to a mother whose baby drowned / gave me advice, or a rumour she once heard: /
“Heaven’s a distance, not a place””. These
ambiguous emotions are felt throughout the album. Sam Beam describes his work as poems before he turns them into
pieces of music. If his text is poetry, then this perception of ambiguous
emotions is self-evident, as quite often emotion within poetry is harder to
define in the way that they are illustrated.
Religious connotations are a
consistency throughout the text of his music; God, heaven and hell, good,
righteous and evil. Postcard is the concluding track on the series with many
religious references to God and the affects religion itself has on us, “the postcard tells you where you’ve been / and dirty dreams of pious
men / who wake in fear but sleep again / with what they’ve done”, “some prophet
died but wrote it down / our serpent bell is on the ground / and all the ladies
sing it loud / hallelujah”, “and watch her children by the flame / the ones you
gave your father’s name / whose evil and his love remained / inside you boy” and “despite our
feelings for the cross / we love you all”. These references are littered throughout the series also appearing
in Minor
Piano Key where a girl implores for her friend or lover to return from
war, “naked she sings the table grace and
then, / prays, prays for her soldier boy”, while in Eden (already biblical in
name) a man sings “As God will be my
judge, / I’m not the man I was / before I found you lying in my garden”. His
poems are both fiction and based on or around real memories or past events.
Although this series of songs may
feel like just that, a series, that may or may not have an over-arching theme to
them as his previous albums have - it persists to have this sense of intimacy.
It’s consistent in it’s recording, the lo-fi production creates sonorities that
you discover and keep finding their way to you the more you listen to each
track. It’s a period of time and style of music that I would love to hear more
of from Iron & Wine.
forteloud rating: 5/5
Slow Black River;
Two Hungry Blackbirds;
Postcard;
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