Iron and Wine – Sea and the Rhythm EP (Sub Pop)

For those unfamiliar with the plaintive, almost-unproduced four-tracked work of Sam Beam, that restrained voice around which Miami’s Iron and Wine orbits, last year’s The Creek Drank the Cradle was a heartbreaking amalgam of banjo, slide guitar, dust and longing. His songs, which draw from all of the Southern standbys – bluegrass, folk, blues and gospel – lament the loss of loves and better times, just as the simple arrangements and folksy instrumentation anchor the sound in a time gone by.

Sam Beam is not an artist one really hopes or expects to “evolve” his sound or “take off in a new direction.” His music has a very intentional anachronistic quality to it, the nature of which sort of defies updating. And so it is not disappointment or boredom but gratitude with which we receive these 5 songs, each of which would have been worthy of making the cut for The Creek Drank the Cradle, and a few of which would have been some of the strongest on the LP. Notably, the title track is a beautiful sad love song that boasts Beam’s boldest vocals to date, to breathtaking effect, and “Jesus the Mexican Boy” successfully weaves a narrative more concrete than the songwriter’s usual (admittedly well-crafted) vague stories.