Even Cowboys Get the Blues: Iron & Wine Butches It Up (A Little) With Calexico
Written: Sep 16 '05 (Updated Sep 16 '05)
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Pros: Sharper, simpler lyrics, and a great spaghetti western atmosphere.
Cons: Sam Beam's no Clint Eastwood.
The Bottom Line: In which the author is tempted to throw on some leather chaps, but thinks better of it.
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| plorentz's Full Review: In The Reins [EP] - Iron & Wine/Calexico |
Today, I feel like a cowboy, and it's not just because the jeans I'm wearing are faded with age and heavy use; nor is it the fact that I'm riding my steel horse -err rally yellow Chevy Cavalier (with moon roof) along the dusty (from drought and construction) paths (read: East Washington Avenue) of Madison. It may have something to do with the itch in my sweat-soaked whiskers, or the way I have to squint my eyes against the afternoon sun; or the way my beaten suburban lawn crunches bonily under my world-weary step; or that feeling of having outrun the law, of breaking out of my white-collar workaday prison cubicle a full hour early. (Though, admittedly, for semi-legitimate reasons.)
Okay, so I may not walk these streets with a loaded six-string on my back; but I have been listening to In the Reins, singer-songwriter Sam Beam's (aka Iron & Wine) recently released EP-length collaboration with the indie instrumental ensemble Calexico, who've made something of a career from mining long lost deposits of Ennio Morricone and Santo & Johnny from the red Arizona deserts. This brief and mostly wonderful record packs enough Dirty Harry drama and Marlboro Man mood (even given Beam's gentle singing) to put dust (of the not-so genuine movie-set sort) on the boots of anyone listening.
Getting back in touch with his masculine side after his Woman King EP, Beam has created a romantic suite, a sort of conceptual song cycle based on the lives and loves of spaghetti western archetypes. These are mostly story songs, and even if the images inevitably feel like recycled bits of Americana, there's something undeniably beautiful and, at times, sexy about them.
In "He Lays In the Reins", a transient cowboy finds himself bound by lust after a brief encounter with a "tall stable girl", his story heightened almost operatically by a full-chested, leather-vested Spanish baritone singing the middle verse. Later, "Sixteen, Maybe Less" covers similar ground, but with an edge of hope and reunion. Less elaborate, but no less moving is "Prison on Route 41", which matches a first person testimonial of how the love of a woman saved a would-be sinner's life to a lilting folk-hymn melody.
Beam conveys these eatin'-beans-by-the-campfire narratives with a newfound (and totally admirable) lyrical directness and simplicity, most effective on the closing "Dead Man's Will", which finds a man methodically bequeathing tiny tokens of his life and memory to his folks:
Give this bone to my father
He'll remember hunting in the hills
When I was ten years old
The song verily aches with regret, but Beam understates it (as any cowboy would). Still, as wonderful as it is here - man, what I wouldn't give to have heard Johnny Cash sing it.
Which, along with the pacing (a bit laborious in the second half), is ultimately the main shortcoming of In The Reins; while Calexico provides all the right colors and moods (except, where'd that muted trumpet come from in "Burn that Broken Bed"), and Beam can bring the quiet sensitivity, he just doesn't (can't, really) deliver the grave, raw machismo inherent in his lyrics. (You read that right. There's machismo in them there Iron & Wine lyrics!)
Case in point: "A History of Lovers", which sounds like nothing so much as a happily misplaced Belle & Sebastian single, with a horn section and everything. It's actually a pretty wonderful song (I am a Belle & Sebastian fan), but it momentarily destroys whatever stubble-faced, spur-heeled, manly man cred Beam had accumulated to that point.
Like Woman King before it, In the Reins never feels like stop-gap product or moldy leftovers. It is its own self-contained work, and a very accomplished one at that. Continuing as it does with broader, more detailed, cinematic arrangements, it may not placate fans of Iron & Wine's early ultra-lo-fi home recordings (which have a beautiful loner sensibility of their own); nevertheless, it finds Beam not only expanding his sonic pallette, but also sharpening his approach to writing. Good stuff.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"In the Reins" by Iron & Wine and Calexico
Overcoat Records
Released 9/13/05
Produced by Craig Schumacher
27 min.
SONGS: He Lays In the Reins - Prison on Route 41 - A History of Lovers - Red Dust - Sixteen, Maybe Less - Burn That Broken Bed - Dead Man's Will
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MORE IRON & WINE:
Woman King (2005)
Recommended:
Yes
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Member: Paul Lorentz
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