Written and recorded in his rural Texas homestead, the fourth studio album from reclusive US singer-songwriter Samuel Beam – aka Iron and Wine – is a far more rounded, listener-friendly affair than his previous introspective, lo-fi offerings. Elements of folk, pop, blues, jazz, gospel and even pastoral poetry all get a look in.
‘Walking Far From Home’, is the melodious, lyrically Cohen-esque, album opener: “I was walking far from home/Where the names were not burned along the wall/ Sour building high as heaven/But the door was so small, door was so small.” Fuck knows what he’s on about, but the devotional delivery is terrific.
While there’s an obvious ‘60s/’70s West Coast pop influence in the harmonies of songs like ‘Half Moon’, there’s darkness aplenty here too – witness the menacingly urgent ‘Monkeys Uptown’ or subtly sinister ‘Rabbit Will Run’. Despite its funky groove, ‘Big Burned Hand’ is actually an anti-war song. A veritable menagerie of animal references pepper these songs, but nowhere as bizarrely as here: “When the curtain rose the crowd was blown away/While the lion and the lamb kept fucking in the back row.”
By Beam’s own admission, ‘Glad Man Singing’ (the album’s original working title) is heavily inspired by the work of doomed poet John Berryman: “A sad man climbed up on a willow bough/ And the cops are on the fence around the dog in a manger/And the mouth of the river is wide.”
Kiss Each Other Clean takes its dirty title from a line in the seven minute closing track ‘Your Fake Name Is Good Enough For Me’ (sounds like a Bukowski poem) – which starts off with Beatnik sax and twanging guitars before segueing into an ascendant jam that ends with Beam imploringly singing an Eastern mantra-like refrain of “Become! Become!”
All told, an offbeat, but very much on-the-Beam album that sees one of America’s most mercurial songwriters emerge blinking and scratching his trademark beard, into the cultural mainstream. Become! Become!