Shearwater

Add Date: February 16

Artist: Shearwater

Album: The Golden Archipelago

Label: Matador

Genre: Rock

Comments: Can I tell you a secret? I didn't really like Rook all that much as an album, but pretended that I did for a while, because I really love Okkervil River and thus really love Shearwater by association (plus their older stuff is solid). So, when I listened to The Golden Archipelago, I was prepared to write a positive review, even if it was just as personally unsatisfying as Rook. Fortunately, the album is actually totally AMAZING and I fell for it within minutes.

Here's a nice, appropriately dramatic blurb from Matador:

"Shearwater continue to explore the beauty, menace, and fragility of the natural world – and that increasingly rare species, the indivisible album – on The Golden Archipelago, the band’s most absorbing and accomplished work to date. The new record is the third panel of a triptych that includes 2006’s enigmatic Palo Santo and 2008’s acclaimed Rook, albums linked by themes of environmental and personal decay and humans’ impact on nature. In The Golden Archipelago, Shearwater turn to a portrait of life on islands – a world of alternating lushness and austerity, numinous silences and sudden cataclysms, and the strange flowerings of plant, animal, and human life that only arise in isolation. These are intimate subjects for songwriter Jonathan Meiburg. As a researcher, he’s camped on islands at the edges of the world, including the Falklands, Tierra del Fuego, the Galapagos, Madagascar, Nunavut, and New Zealand’s Chatham Islands, and once spent a few surreal months in a remote Aboriginal settlement in northern Australia. ...

"The Golden Archipelago’s beautifully and strangely-wrought musical textures summon a majesty, drama, and individuality that few current records attain, or even attempt. The band worked for months with producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Black Mountain, Polyphonic Spree, Explosions in the Sky) to capture the thrilling dynamics that have always marked their live performances, burnished by subtle orchestrations and cascades of mallet percussion. The results are singular, revelatory, and demand to be appreciated as a whole. Islands under siege, islands of impenetrable solitude, islands of the world and islands of the mind - all are here in The Golden Archipelago, whose shores and reefs flicker and beckon, even as they crumble under rising seas."