It’s fitting, then, I suppose, that the first Iron and Wine release worth listening to in nearly a decade arrives just over a decade after I started listening to them (him) in the first place.
Iron and Wine AKA Sam Beam rose to fame quickly in the post 2003/2004 gentrification of “indie music” thanks in part to name drops on The O.C. and the soundtrack to Garden State. Beam’s 2004 effort Our Endless Numbered Days, a mix of both the fragile, somber folk stylings he came from with slightly more instrumentation, has aged surprisingly well, and even after 10 years, it still takes me back to the winter of 2004 into 2005, when a friend of mine burned a copy of it for me when I was a senior in college.
Beam put out two excellent EPs in 2005—the slightly more musically expansive Woman King, followed by the collaborative joint with Calexico, In The Reigns.
Then, let’s face it, dude just fell right off.
2007’s The Shepherd’s Dog, a largely forgettable affair, forsook Beam’s old sound, trading up for a much larger landscape—something that he’s had a real issue with since then, including the subsequent forays into easy listening, adult contemporary, weird jazz fusion, and overall bullshit that he’s put out in 2011 and 2013, respectively.
And so it’s fitting, then, that the first Iron and Wine release that I legitimately enjoy in a decade is made up of archival material recorded in the early 2000s.
Because the internet, some of this material has already been floating around for more than a decade (like the super trill “Minor Piano Keys.”) In a press release about the album, Beam says: “Putting out another record like (Archive Series Vol. 1) now, it seems like there’s been enough time so that it sounds significantly different than what I’ve been doing these past few years. It feels more like a time capsule or a diary entry. The distance makes it more fun.”
Which basically translates to—“Ayo remember when I was good, and people cared about the music I made? Well hey you guys I found all these dope old tracks.”
Look I am fine with “artistic growth” and “musical experimentation” or whatever, but damn—dude just went too far and fucked up, you know? Like some of the songs on Kiss Each Other Clean and Ghost on Ghost were just straight up intolerably bad.
This is how I prefer my Iron and Wine—on a four track recorder, stark, hushed, and evocative.
Archive Series Vol. 1 is a collection of 16 home recorded tracks that didn’t make the cut on his debut album The Creek Drank The Cradle and while it’s not a true return to form for Beam as a performer, it’s a welcome return to the sound that made him an artist worth paying attention to in the first place.
With most archival material, or collections of unreleased songs, you usually can get a sense of why they’ve sat locked away in some vault for some amount of time. Not all of the Archive Series Vol. 1 is, like, a revelation or anything—but nor does it need to be. It’s also never unlistenable. The tape-hiss and lack of pretensions make it charming and endearing, actually. It’s like—oh, how quaint. Lo-fi music!
Some of the Archive Series Vol. 1’ best moments are the aforementioned “Minor Piano Keys,” the surprisingly sweeping grandeur packed into the fragility of “Eden,” the hypnotic string plucking and stark imagery of “Two Hungry Blackbirds,” and the reserved introspection of “Your Sly Smile.”
There is a drawback to a collection like Archive Series Vol. 1, however—and I think there’s really no way around it. When you’re dealing with old, archival material recorded during a very specific timeframe—the problem is that it all kind of starts to sound a little samey after awhile. That’s no fault of Beam’s, really. It’s just the nature of the music he was making at this time—and compiling so much of it to this volume doesn’t so much as test the listener’s patience, but you mos def have to be in the right mindset to appreciate it as a whole, taking into account the less successful tracks of the set.
I don’t know how Beam looks back on his career—meaning, if he’s happy with what’s changed about his sound as Iron and Wine, or if he wishes it could all still be so simple. I mean, Ghost on Ghost was a hot fucking mess. I just can’t imagine him turning that into a label with a straight face. Maybe he is okay with coming off as some kind of modern day Seals and Croft, as he did two years ago.
Archive Series Vol. 1, in the end, serves as a reminder that Beam was a once very promising artist who peaked (maybe) and then subsequently lost sight of just about everything. He, at one time, was steeped very deeply in the post-Will Oldham folk tradition—something that’s apparent from this batch of recordings as well.
They say: “you can never go home again.” That may be true with the case of Iron and Wine. You can’t really go home, but you can find an old, dusty box of four-track recordings in the attic, that reminds you of who, and more importantly, what, you used to be.
Rating: 3.25/5
http://www.ironandwine.com/
Kevin also writes for the super excellent Anhedonic Headphones.