Quiet, contrary to contemporary common wisdom, is not the new loud — it’s the new dull. Yet with each passing month a new crop of bedroom folkies surfaces, all entertaining illusions of being anointed the next Bob Dylan while oblivious to the fact that their meager, muttered four-track meanderings are today’s equivalent of yesteryear’s crappy home demo cassettes. Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam surely understands this; he’s been there, and his press clippings are accordingly littered with alarming cliches like “gentle,” “stark,” “minimal,” “haunting,” “spare,” “casual” “whispered” and — recurring with near-fetishistic frequency — “hushed.”
Never fear, gentle (sorry) readers. The six-song EP Woman King, which follows last year’s ecstatically received Our Endless Numbered Days, reveals a whole new side to the man. Granted, it’s not an extreme makeover, as evidenced by the inclusion of the, er, haunting, hushed “My Lady’s House” (a piano/guitar paean to an idyllic abode and its resident). And Beam still warbles in that curiously compelling Nick Drake/Elliott Smith voice of his.
But most of the material here is hungrily upbeat. Jaunty, even, from the swampy, twangy blues of “Freedom Hangs Like Heaven” (which, with its southern and biblical lyrical imagery, deftly injects metaphysics with mojo), to the modified country-western gallop of “Gray Stables”, to the percussion and slide guitar on the David Crosby-like title cut.
Beam’s probably not going to be donning an AC/DC shirt anytime soon, but he’s clearly found a way out of what was turning into an artistic cul-de-sac. More power to him for that.
