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Shearwater

Rook

Matador | 2008 | Album

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There are moments on Shearwater’s fifth full-length album Rook (their first on Matador Records) that are pure, moody and tinged with the rare gray of brilliant songwriting. It is a surreal, perfectly discordant record that doesn’t so much as thrill its listened, but rather creates and sustains a level of intrigue for it to dwell on.

The whole of Rook doesn’t quite coalesce though – it’s like an album not exactly apt for any particular occasion. The three-piece (oddly Texan, sounding somehow English or Welsh Ren-Faire) features absolutely lovely falsetto bent confessionals (Jonathan Meiberg) percussion brilliance (Thor Harris) and the well-crafted production their label is known for but it isn’t quite there. Rook is relatively compact at around 35-minutes while it maintains some sprawling elements in spite of its brevity; there are ten packed songs. Throughout its wandering course it punctuates with some wonderfully, wild restrained bursts (“On The Death Of The Waters”) and thrillingly cinematic guitars (the opening of “Leviathan Bound” is straight from a filmic introspection). The former is one of the more unexplainably interesting songs of the year; the latter feels desperate and lost in the end in a way that is both harrowing and familiar.

While a step up on the already acclaimed Palo Santo, the album is admirably imperfect. Perhaps that’s the point of it, and I’m missing it. What Rook feels like on its second listen is a drift wood collection: weathered, worn, familiar, yet blistered like the elements.

Erick Mertz