Shearwater - Austin

Jonathan Meiburg (of Okkervil River)
Will Sheff (of Okkervil River)
Howard Draper
Kim Burke
Thor Harris

Shearwater has transformed itself to the point of reinvention on Palo Santo, the band's fourth album. The first Shearwater release to be made up entirely of songs by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Meiburg, Palo Santo resembles previous Shearwater albums only incidentally. It's a thrilling, paradoxical record--icily warm, welcoming and threatening, sloppy and immaculate.

The austere folk that was a trademark of previous Shearwater records makes periodic appearances in Palo Santo, but thorny forests of static and distortion have sprouted up to occasionally obscure it. The band also channels previously unheard influences; the driving staccato piano of "Seventy Four, Seventy Five" recalls early John Cale, and some of the record's more disorienting soundscapes could inhabit the same strange continent as Nico's Cale-produced classic Desertshore. "La Dame Et La Licorne" suggests Talk Talk covering "Madman Across the Water"; "Failed Queen" a grotty three-way orgy--circa 1970--between the Velvet Underground, the Incredible String Band, and Meddle-era Pink Floyd. "White Waves" uncorks a swaggering and impressively heavy electric guitar riff, while "Sing, Little Birdie" might be some forgotten 78 of an old standard, warbling through a morphine haze.

Meiburg and Will Sheff, who began their collaboration as members of the critically lauded Okkervil River, founded Shearwater in 2001 as an outlet for quieter songs on which the two were working. But it wasn't long before Shearwater turned into something else. Shearwater's debut, The Dissolving Room, introduced Meiburg's now ex-wife Kim Burke on upright bass; shortly after, drummer and vibraphonist Thor Harris joined, cementing Shearwater as a band capable of tendering moments of both credible rock and thunderous noise. The addition of multi-instrumentalist Howard Draper plus tours and support dates with the Mountain Goats, Akron/Family and Blonde Redhead hardened Shearwater from a casual ensemble into a tightly focused rock band. Subsequent albums Everybody Makes Mistakes and Winged Life and the EP Thieves have found Meiburg's elegant melodies and striking voice increasingly at the center.

Given that this is the first Shearwater record in which Meiburg's is the only voice handling lead duties, it's surprising how varied the vocals on Palo Santo are. Far from a standard-issue indie-rock mumbler, Meiburg is as ambitious a vocalist as Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) and as captivating as Devendra Banhart or Neil Hannon (of Divine Comedy). His voice, both delicately expressive and emotionally opaque, leaps with grace, even with the most startling gaps in these often deliberately schizophrenic songs, surging forward into your ear only to retreat into an echo-soaked canyon. The lyrics start out clear and direct, but soon become abstract and indecipherable; there's a comparable tension in the instrumentation of Palo Santo, where antique organs cozy up against a quartet of harmonized shortwave radios and arpeggiated banjos battle the world's most hideous-sounding fuzz bass. Similarly, arrangements crystallize into perfect harmony only to be cracked open again by dissonance. There seems to be some kind of narrative thread, but it's broken, frayed, frozen, while hanging over everything there's a sense of mystery that no one could be bothered to clear up or even acknowledge. It's like a transmission you're only picking up part of, but you're listening closely, because it's telling you when and exactly where the missile is going to hit.