In retrospect, there was no way that Sam Beam—or anyone else, for that matter—could keep singing such quiet, devastating songs. Recorded in his living room while he worked a day job teaching cinema in Florida, his early Iron & Wine material examined harsh truths about the precarious nature of marriage and family: Every child grows up and leaves home, every friendship is eventually defined by distance and difference, every marriage ends in death and loneliness. "One of us will die inside these arms," he sang on "Naked As We Came", off 2004’s Our Endless Numbered Days. "One will spread our ashes ‘round the yard." It wasn’t always easy to hear that kind of clear-eyed sentiment, so it couldn’t have been easy to deliver it night after night after night.
Beam’s first forays away from that kind of minimalist folk and its treacherous intimacy were promising, with the Woman King EP and his mini-album with Calexico leading right up to The Shepherd’s Dog in 2007, still a career high. If subsequent albums have sounded less inventive and immediate, the reason wasn’t so much the widescreen arrangements, the experiments with psychedelic jazz and free rock, or even the full band Beam took into the studio and out on the road. Instead, it was a new tack in songwriting, which found him experimenting with fleeting impressionism over concrete details. Each new record put more and more space between Beam and the listener; his songs began to sound affected and oddly distant, as though he were filming a movie whose action took place entirely in the middle distance.
Coming at the end of that ho-hum run of albums, this new rarities catch-all Archive Series Volume No. 1 arrives like a breath of fresh air. Beam is currently between labels, with a few rumored collaborative projects (a duets record with Jesca Hoop, a covers album with Ben Bridwell) overshadowing any talk of his next studio album. While it certainly doesn’t constitute a do-over, it does gently recall a time when he was just beginning to form a strong connection with his listeners and when he could take that indie folk sound in any direction imaginable. Tucked under the bed or squirreled away in the guest bedroom closet, these songs become a point from which to measure his decade-long career, to see how far he has come since he made those first home recordings.
It’s bracing to hear him in this familiar setting once again, to hear the roomy ambience of opener "Slow Black River", a song strong enough to hold its own against anything on The Creek Drank the Cradle. But it’s also a good reminder of just how intricate his minimalist folk arrangements could be. Most of these songs feature just voice and guitar, yet there is a lot going on. There’s a physicality to Beam’s guitar playing, which makes even the slower tunes sound both urgent and casual. The lo-fi production erases any sense of depth in the production, which might be a problem for many artists but here it means that every instrument and every sound is on the same plane—a small wall of sound.
Beam’s strums can be percussive and quietly emphatic, highlighting the breeziness of the melody on "The Wind Is Low" and evoking a sinister force driving "Minor Piano Keys". When he adds instruments—a bass on "Judgement" [sic] or the slide guitar on "Loretta" or what sounds like a mandolin on "Wade Across the Water"—it’s restrained and specific, like a soundtrack composer insinuating emotions onscreen. On the lo-fi "Quarters in a Pocket" a rambunctious banjo conjures a contentment tinged with sadness: "Time spent with you feels like charcoal sketches for a painting that you won’t let me see," he sings over the spiky picking and plucking. "But I’ve come to find that comfort comes like quarters in a pocket, discovered accidentally."
Much like 2009’s Around the Well, the 2xCD retrospective that acted as an epilogue to his Sub Pop tenure and provides a template for Volume No. 1, the songs on here are surprisingly strong, such that any of them could have appeared on a proper album at any point in Beam’s decade-plus career. But the collection never sounds like the sum of its parts. That may be due to the absence of the kind of overarching idea that animates his studio albums, or with the fact that at 16 tracks Volume No. 1 is simply too generous. That’s the nature of any kind of vault-clearing compilation: Instead of a simple snapshot of a period in his career, Beam has created something more like a charcoal sketch. Hopefully, more volumes will soon follow.
