Rook ole-777 CD/LP Street Date: June 3, 2008

Hailed as "almost impossibly majestic and beautiful" (NPR "album of the year"), Shearwater's Palo Santo (2007, Matador), a suite of ethereal but oddly disquieting art-rock songs loosely centered around the life and death of singer Christa Paffgen (aka Nico), marked the Texan quartet's debut on the national stage. Several publications, including The New York Times, named it one of the year's best, and the band's singular combination of sonic abandon and restraint, spun around the soaring, otherworldly voice of part-time ornithologist Jonathan Meiburg, drew comparisons to late-period Talk Talk and both the lovely and anxious moments of Eno's early solo work.

This year's much-anticipated Rook takes the band into realms both richer and stranger. Though a similarly haunted, elegaic mood - punctuated by flashes of dread and menace - pervades the album, Rook is its own animal, at once more accessible (the near-title track, "Rooks", anchored by Thor Harris' thunderous kick drum, a booming organ, and a stately trumpet line, could almost be mistaken for radio-friendly) and more accomplished than its predecessor, with a depth and grandeur that seem improbably packed into the album's tidy 35 minutes. Squalls of feedback have largely given way to sudden gusts of strings and woodwinds, though the band's fondness for unusual instrumentation remains intact - harp, hammer dulcimer, and a curiously carved metal box all take featured roles. Each song is a mini-epic, from the in-medias-res opening of "On the Death of the Waters" to the pounding (but drumless) urgency of "Leviathan, Bound", the abrupt rock of "Century Eyes", the crystalline depths and heights of "I Was a Cloud" and "The Snow Leopard", and the final, elegant flourish of "The Hunter's Star". Rook is unlike any other album you'll hear this year - or any year. It has the vividness and ineffability of a waking dream, the strange beauty and internal logic of a fairy tale, and above all, evokes a vanishing world that may or may not be our own.

Palo Santo: Expanded Edition 2CD, 2LP, DA April 10, 2007

Shearwater has transformed itself to the point of reinvention on Palo Santo, the band's fourth album. The first Shearwater release to be made up entirely of songs by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Meiburg, Palo Santo resembles previous Shearwater albums only incidentally. It's a thrilling, paradoxical record—icily warm, welcoming and threatening, sloppy and immaculate—and one which NPR called "impossibly majestic and beautiful" in naming it the best record of 2006.

The austere folk that was a trademark of previous Shearwater records makes periodic appearances in Palo Santo, but thorny forests of static and distortion have sprouted up to occasionally obscure it. The band also channels previously unheard influences; the driving staccato piano of "Seventy Four, Seventy Five" recalls early John Cale, "La Dame Et La Licorne" suggests Talk Talk covering "Madman Across the Water", "Failed Queen" takes on the Incredible String Band and Meddle-era Pink Floyd. "White Waves" uncorks a swaggering and impressively heavy electric guitar riff, while "Sing, Little Birdie" might be some forgotten 78 of an old standard, warbling through a morphine haze.  Some of the record's more disorienting soundscapes could inhabit the same strange continent as the Cale-produced classic Desertshore by Nico, whose life inspired each song on Palo Santo.

Meiburg and Will Sheff, who began their collaboration as members of the critically lauded Okkervil River, founded Shearwater in 2001 as an outlet for quieter songs on which the two were working, but it wasn't long before Shearwater turned into something else. Shearwater's debut, The Dissolving Room, introduced Meiburg's now ex-wife Kimberley Burke on upright bass; shortly after, drummer and vibraphonist Thor Harris joined. The addition of multi-instrumentalist Howard Draper plus tours and support dates with the Mountain Goats, Akron/Family and Blonde Redhead hardened Shearwater from a casual ensemble into a tightly focused rock band. Subsequent albums Everybody Makes Mistakes and Winged Life and the EP Thieves have found Meiburg's elegant melodies and striking voice increasingly at the center.

Given that this is the first Shearwater record on which Meiburg's is the only voice singing lead, it's surprising how varied the vocals on Palo Santo are. Far from a standard-issue indie-rock mumbler, Meiburg's expressive voice leaps with grace. The lyrics start out clear and direct, but soon become abstract and indecipherable; there's a comparable tension in the instrumentation, where antique organs cozy up against a quartet of harmonized shortwave radios, and arpeggiated banjos battle the world's most hideous-sounding fuzz bass.  Arrangements, too, crystallize into perfect harmony only to be cracked open again by dissonance. There seems to be some kind of narrative thread, but it's broken, frayed, frozen, with a persistent sense of mystery.

“One of the year’s best rock albums...These 11 flickering — and hummable — songs tell a desperate but not quite decipherable story.”
—New York Times

"This is a chilling release, epic in both reach and accomplishment...one of the finest records to be released in recent memory."
—PopMatters