In Stores Now: Kiss Each Other Clean by Iron & Wine

Photo titled "Portrait of Toots Thielemans, Adele Girard, and Joe Marsala, Onyx, New York, N.Y." by William Gottlieb, 1948

In 2002, Iron & Wine was quietly introduced to the world by Sub Pop Records with an album called The Creek Drank the Cradle - the label had received a couple dozen home-recorded demos from cinematography professor Sam Beam, and the songs were so impressive that they just grabbed the best ones and released them as an album. Those hushed acoustic lullabies are still the sound most closely associated with the name Iron & Wine, but no one expected Sam Beam to tread water, releasing the same songs over and over. On the other hand, I don't think most people expected him to sign with Warner Bros. and release the impressively weird record that is Kiss Each Other Clean either.

Kiss Each Other Clean is a record wholly unconcerned with trendiness, not exactly pushing against the current idea of "cool" as much as shrugging it off casually. Beam has said that he wanted to make an album influenced by the records his mother listened to when he was young, and you can feel that '70s-songwriter vibe all over this record. My age-old nemesis the saxophone is all over this record, but it's not the same "smooth sax" that's found on some recent indie records - Beam uses the instrument in interesting (if not entirely un-annoying) ways. Strangely, though, Beam compartmentalizes his experimentalism on this record. There's a pretty clean divide between the album's odd-numbered tracks, rooted more strongly in the Iron & Wine folk heritage, and the more abrasive even-numbered tracks (e.g. the sax is all over tracks 2, 8, and 10). The forward-looking songs like "Big Burned Hand" and "Monkeys Uptown" draw from a wider sonic palette - the latter song even tries to get a little funky - but not one of these experiments is wholly satisfying.

I prefer the measured progression of Kiss Each Other Clean's "safer" tracks, like the backing-vocal-heavy songs "Godless Brother in Love" and "Half Moon". I can't really get behind the album's big promo track "Tree by the River" because it's a little TOO safe, but at least it doesn't have honking sax all over it. Even though it's a real mixed bag, I think this record is a big improvement over 2007's The Shepherd's Dog, which was an unmemorable muddle. The biggest improvement between the two may be in Beam's singing - where the last album didn't have a single stand-out line that I can call to memory, Beam's stronger singing here makes a lot of the lyrics more impactful, almost like it was back when we were straining to hear his whispering.

You can really here the stronger vocals on tracks like the opening "Walking Far From Home", where Beam recycles some of the ideas from one of his best compositions (the non-album track "The Trapeze Singer"), gradually layering sounds to a story about entering paradise. This time around, the arrangement is more haphazard, with harmonizing backing vocals and buzzing organ popping up randomly as the song goes on, but the overall effect is quite nice. As in the best moments on this record, Beam doggedly follows his own muse and finds something unexpected and beautiful.

"Walking Far From Home" by Iron & Wine