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In the final addition to the trilogy of albums spanning Palo Santo, Rook and now, The Golden Archipelago, Jonathan Meiburg’s Shearwater continues to refine the delicately explosive sound that placed Rook at the top of many-a Year End List in 2008. Here again, with nature (and human interaction with it) as the muse, Meiburg steps into the life of island nature as it intertwines with memories of the War in the Pacific. Naturally, it’s a great album (though if you didn’t like Rook, this new one certainly won’t change your opinion). But more naturally it seems, in the year to come, The Golden Archipelago will be put under the critical microscope time and again, until you won’t really need to have heard the album to talk about “the album.” But it would be a shame, a damn shame in fact, to miss out on such an emotionally charged album, if you don’t think about it too hard. So, as I hope was the inspiration of the album itself, let’s see if we can observe it in its element, without pinning it down and suffocating it with a boring rubbing-alcohol analysis.
Despite the dark lyrical themes of opener “Meridian,” fraught with images of a bombing raid on an island set to a backdrop of a dull kick drum and soft dissonant bells (and the chant in the beginning - it’s sung by once-natives of the Bikini Atoll, and you remember what we did to their island…), despite all of this, I was still struck with how Shearwater is so capable of capturing my attention with even the slightest strum of the guitar, or with a steady rhythm on the kick drum. Like with “Rook,” the song communicates a clear emotion, one that’s both ominous and bleak. And sure, you’ll read time and again how that’s the effect of precise instrumentation, expert planning and masterful production — which is all true — but what pulls you in on this album is not really the “complex instrumentation,” after all; it’s that net result - the emotion, the tension.
For all the critical equations of Shearwater with classical music (usually with Meiburg as the conductor), it’s the band’s use of tension that makes this comparison most apt. Shearwater are able to incorporate such energy into such calculated music, to an effect that seems to transcend both. In earlier albums, some songs became so perfect, so delicate, that a veritable glass case surrounded them — appreciation seemed to be the primary means of enjoyment. With changes that began on Rook and are now nearly perfected here, the emotional tension (a perfect match to the lyrics) is at the forefront.
Take “Black Eye,” easily one of the best tracks on the album, not because of its catchy chorus (though it is catchy), but because of it’s use of tension. The piano seems hurried, and the dissonant whines in the background hardly put us at ease. Yet as the track plows forward, there are slight releases as the rhythms change and Meiburg sings, “Now is what the body becomes / in the bellow aloud / in the crack of the drum…” But each release is built up with furious energy, here with horns joining in from the side-stage.
More so than Rook or Palo Santo, though, the flow of The Golden Archipelago is established through this musical tension as much as it is through the usual lyrical themes. Each song flows perfectly into the next, and small points and counterpoints are established throughout the album. The slow but determined “Runners of the Sun” leads us right into the airy verse of “Castaways,” perhaps the most dynamic track here, which wastes no time executing a grandiose buildup of instruments. This process is repeated throughout the album, giving even the least dense songs an air of extreme importance (as they are - many contain some of the most telling lyrics). Even the silence between guitar strums can be the most loaded notes, if they’re bookended properly.
The lyrics on the album continually examine island landscapes, exploring human’s interaction with them, for better or for worse, and the emotional ties that can develop (again, for better or for worse) if humans allow. (To accurately portray some of these themes would take hundreds of quotes here, but suffice it to say, you’ll want to get out your lyric sheet for the first few listens.) So beginning today and likely throughout the rest of the year, there’ll be mounting critical discussion of what makes Shearwater great: is it Meiburg’s light falsetto? Is it the horn parts in “Black Eyes”? The opening drone in “Uniform.” But these are false questions: Increasingly Shearwater is less about the “how” and more about the waves of emotional tension breaking across the album. To observe that feeling, and to simply enjoy it is why I love this album, and I hope you’ll be able to step back for a minute and briefly enjoy the natural beauty of it as so many will not.
Mp3 from The Golden Archipelago:
Black Eyes
Websites:
http://shearwatermusic.com
Myspace
