Musically speaking, these are good times for birdwatchers. The pastoral is back in a big way – in some areas of the modern folksy indie landscape you can’t turn around without tripping over bands called Goose Archipelago or Chirpy and the Tweet-Tweets. Fronted by an ornithologist and named after a family of seabirds, it’s easy therefore to pigeonhole Shearwater with the opener of their new outing Animal Joy; lilting, incantatory vocals deliver a cryptic narrative that namechecks dogs and swallows like a child completing a Springwatch garden survey.
Jonathan Meiburg’s outfit has been around for a long time, since 1999, starting life as a side-project of Okkervil River – and they’re no one trick flying pony. What’s most striking about their recent work is its prominent, forceful drumming, more integral to the production here than to any recent album since The National’s tautly percussive breakthrough, Boxer.
As many of Meiburg’s lyrics are suspiciously elusive, a metaphor might help. Imagine a secret Fleet Foxes gig, where young men gather around a fire in the woods to toast marshmallows and plait daisy-crowns for local maidens. Now imagine someone turning up to that event with a massive drum, and beating it vigorously until someone sets fire to his artfully-tangled beard.
Shearwater at their best sit in the middle of this false polarity – ‘Animal Life’ is an enthralling blend of ancient and modern, rural and urban, and ‘You As You Were’ sounds like LCD Soundsystem begging for their supper when their tour bus has broken down somewhere in Texas Hill country. However, somewhere in the middle of unnecessarily extended rock epic ‘Insolence’, the album itself gets a little lost and a little uncertain.
It’s been a while since Shearwater flew the nest; I’m just not sure if they’ve quite succeeded in building a place of their own.
3 STARS
