Looking over the list of song titles from Shearwater's second album, Everybody Makes Mistakes, one may find a subtle theme. "Room for Mistakes", "Mistakes", and "You Took Your Mistakes Too Hard" all indicate an interest in mistakes, and the title of the album only confirms that concern. Others, like "An Accident", "Wreck", "All the Black Days 1", and "All the Black Days 2", branch off in subtle ways from the main thesis to announce in no uncertain terms that this record is positively sadcore.
Though their lineup has expanded since 2001's The Dissolving Room to include Angels of Light percussionist Thor Harris and ex-Glass Eye frontman/Dead Milkmen producer Brian Beattie, Shearwater is still primarily the side project of Okkervil River's Will Sheff and Jonathan Meiburg. But this album boasts a much fuller sound than their last, due in no small part to their new contributors. Everybody Makes Mistakes broadens the band's sonic palate beyond the Leonard Cohen/Nick Drake school's timeworn standbys of acoustic guitars and pianos by incorporating vibes, accordions, glockenspiels, and organs (amongst other instrumentation), with which they weave together plenty of interesting textures-- the chords they use never sound slapped together, showing some real care and intelligence. "Well, Benjamin" and "Mistakes" even have some honest-to-God bounce, a nearly astonishing ingredient in an album like this.
It becomes frustratingly obvious as the record plays, however, that the musical accompaniment is designed to be just that. Shearwater has a better sense of craft than their moping contemporaries, but their lyrics still stand front and center, with genre cliches doing most of the talking. Most of these songs sound like conversations the pair were too introverted to ever have, and usually express either a deep inner torment to a friend/lover, or analyzing a deep inner torment of a friend/lover to that friend/lover in the voice of one who knows how it feels and how to make it better.
Take, for example, the following lines from "Soon": "When no one else would suffer me, I threw myself at your ankles/ 'He treats his friends like customers, he treats me like a given,' your letter read/ 'Come down,' you said, 'And let me know I'm living.'" It's hard not to wish the musical garnish would overwhelm the main course when the latter consists of such attempts to appear as wretchedly sensitive as this. Which is too bad for Sheff, as occasionally he sounds like he's got some spark in him. The same can't be said for Meiburg, however, whose lyrics and delivery are frustratingly dull.
This kind of melodramatic navelgazing grows overly demanding at LP length to anyone not cemented in a similar mood, making Everybody Makes Mistakes ultimately too depressing for its own good. Of course, listeners who don't mind such emotional monotony-- surely, there are some who actively enjoy it-- can find a lot to like in the material Shearwater crowds to the back. As for me, the self-pity is all a bit too much.
