There are a lot of ways to describe Iron & Wine's dark, woozy folk songs: writers and fans scramble to find the appropriate modifiers, the correct verbs, the variations on "hushed." We make references to babies and jokes about his beard, launching sweeping comparisons to bedroom poets past, yapping happily about Beam's "quietude" and "grace." And now, for the very first time, "loud" can be added to that arsenal of adjectives: the six-song Woman King EP, a follow-up to 2004's Our Endless Numbered Days, opens with relentlessly click-clacking pieces of wood and a brash slide riff, booming out in all directions. And we haven't even gotten to the electric guitar yet-- or the distortion.
Over the course of two full-lengths (and their accompanying EPs), Sam Beam has tweaked and re-imagined Iron & Wine's whisper-folk imprint to include a much broader palette of sound-- anxious and intense, Woman King inches Beam even farther away from his scratchy lo-fi origins without sacrificing any of the microphone-eating intimacy that made his work so appealing to begin with. Woman King was recorded at producer Brian Deck's Engine Music Studios in Chicago (under identical circumstances, but separate from the Our Endless Numbered Days sessions) and features Deck's trademark mix of grainy, untreated percussion and spare-but-layered production (not atypically, Deck is also credited as a band member). Somehow, each step Beam takes feels organic, proper, true-- Woman King (much like Our Endless Numbered Days) is different, but fundamentally linked to its predecessors.
Iron & Wine's album titles are almost always prophetic (2002's The Creek Drank the Cradle dealt with fizzled innocence, 2004's Our Endless Numbered Days tackled human mortality) and Woman King is, for the most part, about girls-- fallen, absent, beloved, virginal, and nefarious.
Thwarted religion has always provided prime lyric fodder for Beam, and the stunning "Jezebel" recounts the rise and fall of the Bible's most infamous Phoenician princess, a pagan follower who becomes involved in a political marriage to Ahab, the crown prince of Israel. According to the Bible, Jezebel caused loads of trouble for Israel until Jehu, the head of a company formed to overthrow the house of Ahab, has her snatched and tossed from a window. Her blood splatters the palace wall; Jehu, on horse and chariot, charges across the body. Later, when palace servants return to recover Jezebel's corpse for burial, all that's left is her skull, her feet, and the palms of her hands. Jehu announces that Jezebel was chewed up by a pack of dogs, fulfilling the divine prophet Elijah's earlier prediction that "the dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel."
Beam gently acknowledges Jezebel's brutal end ("The window was wide/ She could see the dogs come running"), but doesn't necessarily swallow the Bible's cautionary bent: Jezebel is typically read as villainous (with decent reason: she falsely accuses citizens of blasphemy and treason, and orders them stoned to death), but recent feminist re-interpretations of her story have questioned whether or not that vilification can simply be chalked up to the threat she posed to ancient patriarchal orders. Beam plays with his words (a glance at the lyric sheet reveals that he's actually singing "wholly Jezebel," but, you know, say it out loud), and laments how Jezebel was "gone" before he ever got to say "Lay here my love/ You're the only shape I'll pray to, Jezebel." Ultimately, Beam casts Jezebel as more of a heroine (or an object of worship, even) than a righteously fallen pagan, turning "Jezebel" into a perfectly chilling ode to potentially misunderstood women.
A stripped-down version of "Jezebel" can be heard on the officially unreleased (but slipped under many pillows) bootleg 9/20/02 Home Recordings, a collection of demos largely believed to be the Iron & Wine songs Sub Pop opted not to use for Beam's debut. Still, the studio take of "Jezebel" is far fleshier, with Beam's classic guitar and banjo strums backed up by tinkling piano and tiny dulcimer swats-- a dizzying, wispy haze of strings and high, falsetto-coos that hold up well against Beam's very best work.
"Freedom Hangs Like Heaven", while no less religiously charged ("Ain't nobody knows what the newborn holds/ But his mama says he'll walk on water and wander back home"), is a boisterous, slide-fueled throwdown, perfectly acceptable for barn-dancing or open-armed room stomping. "Gray Stables" shows off Beam's knack for harmony (while singing with sister Sarah), "My Lady's House" is vintage Iron & Wine, all acoustic guitar, slight piano, and lovelorn laments, while closer "Evening on the Ground (Lilith's Song)" is a tense, distorted ode to dark garden trysts (interpret "We were born to fuck each other/ One way or another" however you like), complete with spider bites and broken locks and urgent, throaty vocals.
Woman King will provide eager Iron & Wine fans a welcome holdover between proper albums, but the EP also serves a larger developmental purpose, marking one more evolutionary hop for Sam Beam, and christening a new genre-- post-basement.
