Leviathan Bound

Matador is offering up another track for free from Shearwater's Rook. Download "Leviathan Bound" here.

Shearwater - Rook

With the release of Shearwater’s Rook, the band Jonathan Meiburg and Will Sheff started as an Okkervil River side project has officially (and amicably) become its own unhinged force to be reckoned with. Meiburg has been providing most of Shearwater’s creative juice for a while now, and he recently said he’ll no longer be a part of the Sheff-led Okkervil River. And that’s as it should be.

After Shearwater showed what it was capable of on 2006’s impressive Palo Santo, it became apparent that relegating this band to side-project status would be a big mistake. Rook just confirms that further. It’s a continuation of Palo Santo stylistically, but with better songwriting, more thoughtful arrangements and a cohesiveness Shearwater had yet to capture previously. Driving it all is Meiburg’s magnificent tenor. The vocal histrionics would normally be a turn-off for me, but he succeeds by incorporating subtleties into Shearwater’s sound. There’s bombast, but there’s also plenty of open space with dynamic swells.

One thing we should clear up: The album’s title doesn’t refer to those chess pieces that look like castles. Nor does it refer to the Eurasian cow of the same name. This rook is a black bird in the crow family, a reference that makes sense given that Meiburg is a bird fanatic, studying little-known species in far-flung locales like Tierra del Fuego. In fact, Shearwater is named after a seabird, one of its previous albums is titled Winged Life and on the cover of Rook is a man covered with birds. So yeah, he really likes birds.

On the sorta title track “Rooks,” the birds are “laid in piles by the sides of the road” and “burned in a feathering pyre.” This destruction of the natural world is a theme that wends like a river through the album as Meiburg despairs over all the vanishing beauty. “Century Eyes” ominously warns humanity that “You were not the first to arrive and will not be the last to survive.” It’s a decidedly (post)modern concept, but Shearwater’s songs have an ancient feel, filled with natural imagery: the sea, forests, clouds, the moon, stars and lots of animals (ox, leopard, swallows, tiger, etc.). It comes off as haunting and beautiful, as opposed to dorky in an early Genesis kind of way.

“Rooks” is the obvious single, by far the catchiest song on the album despite the incinerating-birds subject matter. “Leviathan Bound” and “Home Life” have some of the best, lush string arrangements, while “Lost Boys” employs a marching band beat. “I Was a Cloud” is appropriately airy and ethereal, Meiburg’s whispy falsetto combining with light piano plinks and softly picked guitar to create a vibe not unlike Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago. “South Col” is the only slightly weak spot, an instrumental track filled with eerie screeching you probably won’t need to hear more than once or twice.

I’d bet the album is particularly nice on vinyl, but even on compressed mp3s the range of volume is wide, going from a whisper to a clamor and back again. It makes for a mildly frustrating car album (unless your vehicle is super quiet) but a great headphone album. Either way, if you play Rook loud--fully capturing those quiet subtleties and permitting the stentorian sections to blast as they should--it’ll take flight.

Rook is out today on Matador Records.

mp3: Shearwater - Rooks (highly recommended)