“Winter Prayers”, a standout on Iron & Wine’s sixth album, Ghost on Ghost, begins quietly and disarmingly. Following the short, breezy instrumental coda of “Sundown (Back in the Briars)”, with its soft eddies of violin, “Winter Prayers” features only Sam Beam’s voice and guitar, with a sympathetic piano gently reinforcing the song’s delicate melody. What makes the moment so notable is how closely it resembles the Iron & Wine of yore, when Beam was recording albums in his living room and smuggling dark thoughts via comfort-food folk. Is the song just a means of offsetting some of the fuller and louder passages that make up the bulk of Ghost on Ghost? Or is it something slyer and more self-aware, a wink and a nod to the old self he’s left behind? Is Beam trying to remind us just how far he’s come since he calculated Our Endless, Numbered Days?
He has, in fact, come very far. In an effort not to play the sad strummer covering the Postal Service for the rest of his life, Beam has spent the last decade engaged in an arms race with himself. With each album he has seriously and self-consciously expanded his range, indulging new musical modes while locating finer grains of emotion. When he’s at his best, it can be bracing to watch a man whose repertoire once seemed so limited perform new tricks: In 2005 the Woman King EP slyly fitted his low-key folk with rustic percussion and sharp country-blues riffs, and two years later The Shepherd’s Dog (still his finest effort) revealed new full-band ambitions and arrangements as unruly as cowlicks. That pair of releases argued persuasively that Iron & Wine was more than just a guy, a guitar, and a beard.
What was truly remarkable about The Shepherd’s Dog was how quickly, confidently, and gracefully Beam shifted from folk minimalist to roots maximalist. However, 2011’s Kiss Each Other Clean sounded like a step backwards, toggling between the seemingly effortless (the affectionately nostalgic “Tree by the River”) to the turgidly effortful (the strained Dylanisms of “Walking Far form Home”). It plays like the transitional album that should have preceded, not followed Dog. Unfortunately, Ghost on Ghost is haunted by that same sense of in-between-ness: Beam is obviously excited about playing with new sounds and ideas, but he seems as yet unsure how to piece them together.
“Winter Prayers” is one of the quietest moments on the album, but it’s also one of the least fussy songs. Working again with Tin Hat Trio’s Rob Burger, who provides horn and string arrangements, Beam has recorded an album dense with ideas and busy with musical flourishes that distract as often than they cohere. Opener “Caught in the Briars” catches you off guard with its low thrum of horns and reed instruments bolstering one of Beam’s sunniest melodies. Soon the rattletrap percussion comes in, a little stodgy in this context. Then comes piano, adding nothing. The backing vocals insert persistent oohs and aahs, and the whole thing takes on a sequiny sparkle before the song falls down a flight of stairs on the coda.
Of course it’s admirable that Beam wants to push himself, to constantly redefine himself, to continually redraw the boundaries of his art. The fact that he’s willing to include some blues riffs and jazz combos on Ghost on Ghost-- hell, just the fact that he’s interested in rhythm at all-- suggests that he has a broadminded view of Americana that transcends folk and country. But Beam doesn’t do all those styles equally well. His nods to 1970s lite rock on “The Desert Babbler” and the Carpenters-slick “Grass Windows” more than pay off, but “Joy” is sickly sweet, and Iron & Wine-as-jazz-combo is disastrous: “Lovers’ Revolution” is a hot mess of overwrought druggy lyrics and underthought Beat rhythms, and when the song breaks for its instrumental interlude-- too gentle to evoke the havoc of a bad high, too rhythmless to be a New Orleans funeral parade-- it accommodates one of the most awkward musical passages of the year.
The inconsistency frustrates: One minute the arrangements sound crowded with sonic bric-a-brac, the next minute Beam turns on his inner editor, settles into an easy melody, or drops an imaginative turn of phrase. He’s an inventive songwriter with an idiosyncratic lyrical style, and most of the songs on Ghost on Ghost convey a sense of travel and transience with their place names and concrete details. The American Southwest figures prominently in his lyrics, as Beam evokes that specific quality of California light on “The Desert Babbler” and “New Mexico’s No Breeze”. His postcard impressionism gives the album its own distinct personality within his catalog, which comes through despite the cluttered production. In other words, Ghost on Ghost is best when it’s most straightforward and worst when the experimentalism becomes desperate rather than bold. Too often it sounds as though Beam is less interested in defining a new sound and more concerned with distancing himself from an old one.
