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IRON AND WINE
Our Endless Numbered Days (Sub Pop)
Reviewed by Erick Mertz
The first thing you know about Iron and Wine's album Our Endless Numbered Days is how much impact Sam Beam's soft voice - a near whisper, carries - how just straining to hear his words give them a world of increasingly salient meaning. It enchants you, and you listen closer for clues to his cryptic meaning and before the album has expired, you're ready to hear it again.
Based out of Miami Florida, Sam Beam is the pulse of Iron and Wine and his follow up to 2002's album, The Creek Drank the Cradle, is an emotionally investing affair of country tones and string arrangements. As surprising as its place of origin (who really associates Dade County with enlightened, spiritual country music?) is Our Endless Numbered Days' ability to, in the relatively short running time of 45 minutes, cover a full breadth of worldly topics, from life and love's affirmations to mortality. And all the while, Beam does so in a hushed, pained voice, hardly wavering from a philosopher's wisdom.
In his concise musical approach, Sam Beam on Our Endless Numbered Days sounds like Greg Brown, only more sensuous; like a modern day Nick Drake he wields a deft scalpel, making the same precise emotional cut time after time after time. Drake wasn't interested in showcasing a wild array of styles; he honed the nails of his songwriting, and drove them into the depths of his listener's consciousness. A reflective, imaginative lover appears in "Love and Some Verses" and "Radio War" and "Cinder and Smoke" and on a handful of songs in between. Where in one the details of her dress appear as the muse, in another it is flashing images of smoke stained skies and summer garden moments. The artistic creations Beam plays always seem to reflect some truth revealing side.
In the pale lit morning, the one after the war, we'll be listening to Sam Beam, whatever he decides to call himself at that moment. Today it's Iron and Wine, and its folk sound is that of one man trying desperately not to drown in the miasma of his own affairs. Tomorrow we'll still be listening, whatever name he chooses.
© 2004 - Erick Mertz