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Iron & Wine’s joyful sadness, another Sleep Station concept album, and BR549 returns to form

Iron & Wine
Our Endless Numbered Days (Sub Pop)

There is a devastating beauty to Our Endless Numbered Days, Iron & Wine’s new record of simply produced and deeply moving songs. Iron & Wine is Sam Beam, a South Carolina native who teaches cinematography in Miami and Sub Pop’s most magical discovery of the 21st century. His murmuring voice layers poetry over sparse tunes created on acoustic guitar, banjo and mandolin, punctuated by various percussion instruments.

Beam’s 2002 debut The Creek Drank the Cradle amazed listeners and critics; this time around they’re not missing the chance to write about this Southern poet and show his Civil War-bearded face in No Depression, Paste and other music magazines of note. Luckily, the sophomore effort meets and perhaps exceeds the expectations laid out by the first. Produced at Chicago’s Engine Studios, the record partly removes the low-fi blanket that dampened Beam’s voice on his self-produced debut. The result is an illumination of the lyrics, a chapbook of sonnets to love, family life, pastoral scenes, the passing seasons and reflections on mortality. In several instances, Beam speculates on his—and sometimes his lover’s—death. And yet, in his soothing, whispery tones, the morbid imaginings are beautiful and honest. Beam’s simple verses capture the simultaneous happiness and sadness of existence—that being happy to be alive exists alongside a knowledgeable mourning for the inevitable end. That death makes life precious.

Such heavy themes make these quiet songs like folk hymns or prayers delicately delivered in Beam’s deep whispers. To surrender to the implicit sadness of life and still find the strength to live and enjoy it: that is the lesson of Our Endless Numbered Days.

—Paige M. Travis

Sleep Station
After the War (Eyeball Records)

Making a concept record can be a dangerous proposition. When done properly, the concept album can elevate music to unparalleled levels of wonder and beauty. Oftentimes though, it’s a way for musicians to elevate half-assed ideas, or to make an entire album do the job of a single song.

Not so with New Jersey based Sleep Station. Lyrical, intricately subtle, and driven by obsessive musical impulses, this five-piece pulls off the epic with relative ease.

Sleep Station’s first plunge into the concept album was last year’s Hang in There Charlie, the story of a 1970s astronaut abandoned by ground control and left to a slow, lonely death in space. The band followed Charlie with another concept record, Von Cosel. An EP available for free download at www.voncosel.com, Von Cosel is a five song black romance, in which a doctor falls in love with a deceased TB patient, preserves her body with formaldehyde, and secretly lives with the corpse for nearly a decade.

Sleep Station’s latest is After the War. The record threads a single World War II soldier’s experience through a framework of outside contextual viewpoints. The resulting narrative could very well pass for the soundtrack to a war film.

In fact, the music itself comes across as intensely cinematic, which is hardly a surprise, given that frontman Dave Debiak intended his first concept album to be a film, but then could not find the funds to shoot it. Debiak is reminiscent of filmmaker P.T. Anderson (Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love) in that his empathy for his characters runs deep. Beneath a lush, at times almost poppy, soundscape comes a generational tale of life, death, war, peace, loss, and love. After the War is a heartfelt, gracious and wholly unsentimental effort, one that, given our country’s current state of war, could very well prove timeless.

—Lloyd Babbit

BR549
Tangled in the Pines (Dualtone)

In 1995 seeing BR5-49 through the smoky haze of the Mercury Lounge was like a religious experience for me, as if I were seeing God’s own hillbilly band. From the top of their western hats to the soles of their vintage cowboy boots, they looked and sounded as if they had stepped out of the 1950s. But the thing is, these guys could really play and had the whole club rockin’ to their rockabilly/hardcore country sound.

But each record the band released seemed to get farther away from that powerful sound, replacing it with attempts at polishing their songs to appeal to a wider audience.

Now nine years and four albums later—minus two original members and the hyphen—BR549 are back with a new disc, Tangled in the Pines. With the addition of bass player Geoff Firebaugh and guitarist/singer Chris Scruggs (grandson of Earl Scruggs) BR549 has toned down the Western getup and focused more on the songs.

The first album of all-original material is the closest they’ve come to committing their live sound to a studio disc. When listening to the opening track “That’s What I Get,” it’s almost impossible not to tap your toes.

In “Movin’ the Country” which includes the lyrics, “They promise you this/They promise you that/ You never know what to believe/ All I want to do is live the good life someone promised me,” Chuck Mead expresses the frustrations of being in a band that everyone says is the next big thing but not seeing results.

This album has more of an Americana sound than their previous efforts, which had a honky-tonk feel to them. The distorted fiddle sound of “Run a Mile” is a nice change of pace.

BR549 may attract new fans with this disc, but it is their live shows that will have them coming back for more.

—Brad Ridenour

April 8, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 15 © 2004 Metro Pulse