Iron and Wine - Shepard's Dog

I don’t know about everyone else, but I kind of liked those lo-fi homestyle records Sam Beam put out when Iron and Wine was first established. The greatest strength of Iron and Wine’s early music is its immediacy; Beam’s whispered vocals and warm guitars feel as close to you as your own skin. As Sam Beam pursues production quality and artistic exploration, I increasingly lose interest; the emphasis on production and marketability make the music newly cold and distant.

Beam's latest effort Shepard's Dog seems to make the definitive leap to a dense, production heavy sound. Throughout the album, I have difficulty connecting with even his best songs because he seems isolated from the end product. Additionally, the inclusion of West African and Arabic influences in Shepard’s Dog seems an unnatural choice for Beam, who seems so at home in uncanny renderings of southern aesthetics. The most successful efforts, “The Devil Never Sleeps” and “Pagan Angel and Borrowed Car” draw on a similar old south aesthetic, be it jazzy blues or off-kilter honky tonk. Beam’s austere early recordings were refreshingly simple; his new work is affected and often tries too hard. While I recognize that part of being a successful artist is aesthetic exploration, I also feel that authenticity is critical to good albums. And Shepard's Dog is lacking in the earnestness that made Creek Drank the Cradle beautiful despite its lo-fi simplicity.