Samuel Beam has the face of a Viking. There’s a Medieval coldness in his eyes, and with one of the biggest beards in all of contemporary musicdom, he looks like nothing so much as the Iron John of European lore, revived and re-immortalized in Robert Bly’s manifesto of manhood of the same name. He’s the mysterious man in the wood; the distant, inscrutable father figure; the crooked, bedraggled hermit, self-reliant and decisive and mystical.

Or so his looks would have us believe. But on his new EP, this Floridian singer-songwriter who records under the storybookish moniker Iron and Wine, whose given name instantly, if inexactly, recalls an iconic brand of hard liquor, far from being the paragon of tameless masculinity suggested by his appearance, prostrates himself before the fairer sex with six whispered and worshipful songs of womanhood.

No savage grunts, no giant wooden clubs, no war paint, or gunfights, or braves tales of conquest and derring-do here, no sir. Just six mystic reveries on Woman’s (capital W!) power and glory, full of precious lyrical anachronisms, and loaded up with portentous images drawn from both Willa Cather and the Old Testament. In these songs, every woman is an archetype. The Immaculate Virgin. The Strong Mother. The Righteous Whore.

Or, as on the bitterly confrontational closing track – written in the first person as woman addressing her man - the mother of all mothers, virgins, and whores herself: Lilith. “We were born to fuck each other, one way or another,” he sings, boldly going where very few men dare to go (or care to) with a line that wouldn’t sound out of place on just about any Sinead O’Connor record. Meanwhile, in the opening title track, Beam juxtaposes images of nostalgic domesticity – shirtsleeves on a clothesline, lemonade jars, and hornet’s nests – against a portentous prophecy – “hundred years, hundred more, someday we may see a woman king” – over a swampy, chant-like slide guitar groove.

Throughout the disc, Beam sings of women carrying men’s shame and taking their blame, suffering men’s weaknesses, cruelties, insecurities, disloyalties and desires. His voice is invariably a haunted, intense, stage-whispered tenor full of airy urgency; and the songs are delivered with indigenous passion – like melodies passed through generations, and stories from a shared, instinctive memory.

Unlike Beam’s earliest recordings, the songs of Woman King are performed by a full, mostly acoustic band (including Sarah Beam, who doubles Samuel’s voice throughout to gorgeous effect) - piano, guitar, banjo, fiddle, and all sorts of “small” percussion, cowbells, and triangles, and woodblocks. And on songs like “Freedom Hangs Like Heaven” or “Evening on the Ground (Lilith’s Song)”, the band plays with an Appalachian revival tent fervor.

Even if his lyric sheet, with all of its excesses - all the my ladys and carry your babes - feels a little corny, Beam’s passionate performances, and the dark, gothic spaciousness of the music itself, mostly justify his tales-of-old affectations. Woman King, brief as it may be, is nonetheless compelling, and pretty-damned visionary. Not a bad way drop a few bucks.

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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:

“Woman King” by Iron and Wine
Sub Pop Records
Released 2/22/05

Produced by Brian Deck
24 min.

SONGS: Woman King – Jezebel - Gray Stables – Freedom Hangs Like Heaven – My Lady’s House – Evening on the Ground (Lilith’s Song)



Recommended: Yes