[This review originally appeared on Earlash.com]
Shearwater
Winged Life
Misra Records; 2004
By Tobias Carroll
Consider, friends, Americana. I dig No Depression as much as the next guy, have begun developing an affinity for bluegrass, and borrowed an Emmylou Harris album from my dad the last time I was in New Jersey. I am, indeed, a target market for this genre, and that’s fine with me. An album by one of today’s better singer-songwriter types – I’m thinking, personally, of the likes of Gillian Welch or Damien Jurado here – can wrench the hell out of the listener, but it’s done within the confines of an existing tradition. Americana is where I can go to meet certain expectations as far as well-made music is concerned, which is both a worthy asset and a persistent flaw.
And yet for me – and, I suspect, for the members of Shearwater – the things that are considered quintessential parts of growing up as a young American are becoming more and more suffused with elements which are not, well, American. I took long, aimless drives with a half-dozen British shoegazer bands’ songs emanating from my stereo, walked through strip malls with Kevin Shields on the brain, passed high school football fields thinking of the Smiths and Pink Floyd.
All of these experiences were evoked when listening to Shearwater’s third album  Winged Life achieves a remarkable consistency of tone, despite a varied use of musical styles, two vocalists with contrasting approaches, and lyrics that range from novelistic to sparse. What holds it all together is a shared vision, a poet’s eye for detail and metaphor, and crystallized moments that stay in the listener’s mind as they evoke unlit plains of memories.
Songwriters and vocalists Jonathan Meiburg and Will Sheff also play in Okkervil River. If said band is the sound of roots music distilled and subsequently exploded, Shearwater is much more about restraint. “Whipping Boy� boasts some of the album’s most striking lyrics, as Meiburg croons, “Just to see him laugh/ I would have washed in the blood of an innocent man/ Let the whipping boy ride,� yet the volume of the plucked banjo behind it never rises too high. Like Sufjan Stevens’s recent work, Shearwater are able to use a minimally played banjo to devastating effect.
“Wedding Bells are Breaking Up That Old Gang Of Mine� feels like a novel in miniature. Sheff begins by almost whispering, “Went to see the new baby/ And we smoked weed on the back porch�. His narrative of being caught off-guard by the newfound responsibilities of others – “And I’m the only one/ At the top of my lungs/ Who’s still swinging sweet adelines� – has a defeatist beauty to it. The minimalist instrumentation, driven at times by an organ, recalls Arab Strap’s similarly literary Philophobia.
Lyrically, this is a rich album, with lines that bury themselves within you: “A Makeover�’s “You’re like a convert who goes back to work/ When he can’t retrieve how the clarity actually felt� and “(I’ve Got A) Right to Cry�’s “I can hear the generators hum/ Roaring like an evil stadium / Will you calm down, sir/ Will you calm down?�.  The organ heard throughout the album reaches its peak on the penultimate track, “Sealed�, exploding into a delirious frenzy that recalls Talk Talk’s unclassifiable Spirit of Eden.
Winged Life is about a lot of things. Listening to its twelve tracks in one sitting invokes disillusionment and transcendence; urban life and ill-conceived love; long drives, paranoia, and religion. It may not sound much like the Carter Family, but this is what 2004’s Americana sounds like.
