Iron and Wine – Around The Well

It never fails to surprise me, the unexpected places you can find the music that you end up falling in love with.

I once spent an extremely bored summer belatedly (by about four years) discovering The OC, by way of an old flatmate’s DVD box set, and at the same time managed to discover Sufjan Stevens (Jonny’s funeral, Season 3, if you’re interested. ) A much more fortuitous discovery, you might agree.

Likewise, the first time I came across Iron and Wine was when his cover of Postal Service’s ‘Such Great Heights’ was used in an Ask.com advert. You remember the one – if you don’t ask, you don’t get? Small skinny man asks for a piggy back off a gigantic Hispanic gang member and gets one? Come on people, believe! Internet search engines can bring the people together! Well, perhaps not, but if they can introduce you to the joy that is Samuel Beam then that’s good enough for me.

Thus it is with joy that I greet the release of Around the Well, a veritable opus of a recording featuring out-of-print tracks, b-sides, rarities and never before released songs dating from way back before most of us knew he existed, right up to his most recent recordings for 2007’s The Shepherd’s Dog.

Released on Sub Pop as either a 2CD or 3LP record, the album is split into two halves and supported by a ten-date tour of ‘intimate’ shows in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles New York and Chicago, the set lists for which fans will vote on-line (how I wish I lived in one of those cities, even if it had to be Los Angeles). The two halves, according to official press, encompass “hushed home recordings, unedited and raw, and moments captured in the confines of proper studios with the help of other musicians, friends and engineers”, not that you’d notice the distinction.

Raw and un-edited, or ‘with the help of engineers’, all of Iron and Wine’s music is infused with the same gentle southern afternoon, just-awoken-from-sleep dreaminess that has drawn comparisons, variously, with Nick Drake, Elliott Smith and Simon and Garfunkel, and which makes you feel asif you’re being whispered awake on a back porch somewhere in Beam’s native South Carolina, dozing in the sunlight with a glass of lemonade. Woozy, wine-soaked vocals combine with gentle banjo and country-tinged slide guitar to create an album of such extreme loveliness that it’s difficult to choose a single high-point.

From the dark country blues of ‘Dearest Foresaken’, to the epic nine and a half minute finale of ‘Trapeze Swinger’ which clearly echos previous Calexico collaborations,  the album, despite tapping a similar vein throughout, never loses momentum, perhaps thanks in part to some inspired covers, including the gorgeous reworking of ‘Such Great Heights’, as well New Order’s ‘Love Vigilantes’ and The Flaming Lips’ ‘Waitin’ for a Superman’. And, unlike some such ‘rarities’ albums, this is one that works, not just for fans, but also as an introduction to the as yet un-seduced. Whichever you are, I recommend you own it.