Iron And Wine – Light Verse: Review

 

 

 

Meant to be consumed from beginning to end as a total sum, the result is the least burdened Iron And Wine album, and often a delight.

Anyone would completely be forgiven for manifesting long-term effects of the pandemic, but with Iron And Wine‘s Sam Beam the issues were more acute, if less personally dangerous.

Surrounded by a community of family and friends, where other artists took creative refuge in the emotional upheaval of lockdowns and loss, the singer lapsed into a funk of songwriting inertia which stayed for two years. Unable to rewire, output ground to a halt.

Any tentative steps had to be baby ones as a result, and after travelling to Memphis in 2021 to record a couple of tracks for the Lori McKenna EP with Matt Ross-Spang, a return to live work was by necessity low key, realised by a series of one-man shows played at intimate venues.

By the following year, any curse had lifted and the material for what would become Light Verse began to pour out. Hiring producer Dave Way and gathering a cast of Los Angeles-based musicians, everybody decamped to a studio high up in BoHo Laurel Canyon, with additional work taken care of by a 24-piece orchestra.

The album’s title, Beam says, is a take on the topic of being itself, in summary: ‘Light verse is a form of poetry about playful themes that often uses nonsense and wordplay.’

Inspired by the pastoral surroundings, he also meant for it to be consumed from beginning to end as a total sum, and the result is the least burdened Iron And Wine album, and often a delight.

Opener You Never Know epitomises leaving a cocoon, the first tentative back porch-country gathering pace and instrumentation like a dust ball until eventually it emerges blinking into a new light. Charming and raw, at once it has the effect of both corner turner and dividing line against the past.

The cast of characters on Light Verse are intertwined, both fictional and biographical. The villain at the heart of Anyone’s Game appears to be able to reincarnate spirit and body (‘First they kiss their lucky dice and then they dig themselves a grave/They do this until it’s killing them to try’) as the scratchy strings and revival chorus recalls vintage Fleetwood Mac playing a barn dance.

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A record with a glint in its eye means less taking things at face value; disallowed fatalism by being locked up, the slightly wicked narration to Cutting It Close is hedonistic, Beam wryly intoning, ‘Long lost friend of mine/I know we only fucked a couple of times/Love owes nothing to us’, before admitting, ‘I’m kissing anyone who’s kissing me back’.

If that seems more disposable than regular listeners would expect, the ensemble reaches peak effect on the epic Tears That Don’t Matter, nearly seven minutes of which its passages border on rock theatre, the lyrics musing expansively on God and other things easily lost and found.

Theology also plays a philosophical part on closer Angels Go Home, belying a tune which largely dwells in soft focus strings and a benign sense of peace.

The centrepiece however is All In Good Time, a swinging, rootsy ballad featuring a delightfully rough-edged sounding Fiona Apple, the mutual goal having been a call and response duet in the grand country tradition, one which is achieved with no little style.

Recently, Iron And Wine celebrated the twentieth anniversary of Our Endless Numbered Days, the release which endeared a huge new audience to their quilted Americana.

After writer’s block and becoming a refugee from his own muse, Light Verse is the response of a writer confidently stepping into a future as unpredictable as it ever was.

Armed with a smile and the knowledge that he’s made it this far, whatever’s next should be a breeze.