ARTIST: Shearwater
TITLE: Palo Santo
LABEL: Misra
GENRE: Indie
BITRATE: 199kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 0h 43min total
RELEASE DATE: 2006-05-00
RIP DATE: 2006-03-03
Track List
----------
01. La Dame Et La Licorne 5:19
02. Red Sea Black Sea 2:58
03. White Waves 4:21
04. Palo Santo 3:48
05. Seventy Four Seventy Five 3:21
06. Nobody 3:02
07. Sing Little Birdie 3:10
08. Johnny Viola 2:30
09. Failed Queen 5:51
10. Hail Mary 5:11
11. Going Is Song 3:41
Release Notes:
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 new album is being released on the Austin-based Misra label.
Shearwater will be playing multiple parties as well as a formal showcase during
SxSW.
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.