Iron and Wine

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A stellar album

Samuel Beam is the luxuriantly-bearded, father of five daughters, accomplished painter and former film lecturer behind one of America's finest bands, Iron and Wine. If you can imagine an academically-minded frontiersman with an appreciation of seventies soft rock you might get an idea of the sound of his stellar fourth album.

If Beam registered his dismay at Bush's re-election on 2007's The Shepherd's Dog here he's evolved from troubled troubadour into a man who's clearly in love with life. That switch from lo-fi simplicity means a sumptuous, widescreen approach that resurrects the saxophone and xylophone from the musical graveyard and recalls hazy summers of youth.

Opener Walking Far From Home, a kind of a mystical, hallucengic travelogue through a broken landscape full of arresting imagery, sets the tone while the slippery Lazarus and Me lets a drowsy-sounding alto sax wander in from nowhere and never out stay its welcome. Beam's beguiling talent for musical shape shifting continues on Godless Brother in Love and Big Burned Hand, a souped-up country funk song complete with tooting sax, syncopated vibes, off-the-beat drums and a guitar sound that can only be described as squelchy.

Beam even lays his hand on a flute, that most wizened of prog rock toys, and presses into service on the dawn chorus of Rabbit Will Run. With a beautiful turn of phrase ("as far as I know the night won't compensate the blind."), a frothy mix of seventies West coast influences, and melodies that soar like giant redwoods, Beam's take on cosmic American music is an all-embracing broad church of great songs.

Alan Corr

Tracklisting: Walking Far From Home, Me and Lazarus, Tree by The River, Monkeys Uptown, Half Moon, Rabbit Will Run, Godless Brother in Love, Big Burned Hand, Glad Man Singing, Your Fake Name is Good Enough For Me