Iron & Wine – The Creek Drank The Cradle

Sam Beam is of that sort, it should be said. The demented genius one-man-band archetype. You know, the same sort as Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) and Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes). Which really just means two things, likely: 1) Sam Beam doesn’t sound near as cool as “Iron And Wine”, and 2) like the chaps listed above, Beam is a control freak. And why not? Who else nowadays likes to play 1920s blues garnished with a slice of Blind Lemon?

Beam teaches cinematography at a college in Florida, notable here only because it helps to explain his music’s expansive, decades-at-a-time sweep. The Creek Drank The Cradle is, rather maddeningly, like everything you’ve ever heard and nothing you’ve ever heard, all at the same time. “Lion’s Mane”, which opens with a soft acoustic strum and an ever softer vocal, treads seemingly familiar lyrical terrain, but manages to be wholly untraceable, like walking down the street where you live with a newly minted case of amnesia.

“The Rooster Moans”, with its kaleidoscopic banjos, and “Upward Over The Mountain”, the story of killing a snake, resonate with a physical beauty — even amidst violence — that is positively Peckinpah-esque. There’s a bit of slide in here, and the odd mandolin too. There’s also a fair amount of Nick Drake by way of Antietam: soft melancholic lullabies that are the musical equivalent of a worn old boot.

Despite the fact that Beam lives in Miami, one doesn’t sense any of his songs are trust fund babies, pre-weathered like jeans from the Gap. Indeed, if there are holes in the songs of The Creek Drank The Cradle, they’re from constant use.