Iron & Wine
The Creek Drank the Cradle
Sub Pop

If there's such a thing as a national economic zeitgeist, it's incredibly favorable to the home-taping, limelight-avoiding musicians who spend their extra time plugged into a four-track, computer, DAT deck or even playing to a boom box. After all, what better way to save $20 on a Friday night than to skip the movies, stay home and record a few songs for little more than the cost of electricity?

Home tapers have been around since the days of reel-to-reel, of course, but it's hard to think of a better commercial era for homemade sounds. Home studios are cheaper than ever to build, and record labels aren't exactly making money hand over fist like they were at the height of Nirvana and the alternacraze just a few short years ago, which is just a long way of saying that the time was right for Sub Pop's Jonathan Poneman to be introduced to the homebrewed sounds of Iron & Wine, the stage name of Miami-based screenwriting teacher Sam Beam. After being asked for a demo, Beam submitted two full-length albums, which were distilled down into the 11-song The Creek Drank the Cradle.

The Creek Drank the Cradle is an old-fashioned, Southern folk-blues album, the sort of thing Alan Lomax and his dad, John, might have recorded on one of their roadtrips, all those years ago. Or, to provide a more recent comparison, the sort of stuff Led Zeppelin were grooving on when they recorded the gentle, acoustic side of III.

As can be expected, there's plenty of twangy banjo, slide guitar and American pastoralism. And while those three ingredients don't exactly define the Sub Pop sound, Beam eases into his lovely, understated album with "Lion's Mane" and "Bird Stealing Bread," whose twangs are among the album's most muted.

Anyone familiar with the likes of Nick Drake, Neil Young or their latter-day followers will find plenty to like on these tracks. There's not much to them other than plucked guitar and voice. And none of the album's material approaches upbeat, settling it easily into the fluid genre of minimalist singer-songwriter stuff.

Like most good singer-songwriters, Beam proves himself an immensely talented lyricist. His chops are on display immediately in the album opener, "Lion's Mane:"

So I'll clear the road, the gravel/ and the thorn bush in your path/ that burns a scented oil/ that I'll drip into your bath/ the water's there to warm you/ and the earth is warmer when you laugh

Those words, sung in a cozy lullaby style Beam returns to throughout the album, embody what makes The Creek Drank the Cradle so timeless. Just as the earth is warmer when the subject of "Lion's Mane" laughs, the air somehow feels warmer when Beam sings. It's the kind of gray, rainy day song that makes a fire in the hearth redundant.

The rest of the album follows the same melancholy, yet friendly, tempo. On "Bird Stealing Bread," Beam sets up a sun-dappled musical snapshot:

I've a picture of you on our favorite day by the seaside/ there's a bird stealing bread that I brought out from under my nose.

But then tears it up only a couple of verses later:

Do his hands in your hair feel a lot like a thing you believe in/ or a bit like a bird stealing bread out from under your nose?

As other critics have astutely observed, some of Beam's lyrics are both deeply personal and universally ambiguous at the same time: "Bird Stealing Bread" and "Lion's Mane" are both love songs; yet they're interpreted either as being about parental love or romantic love. The shading of Beam's words and the care he takes to make them universal is so subtle it's hard to notice without it being pointed out.

But the lyrics are just the foundation on which the album is built. On several tracks, most notably "An Angry Blade," Beam lets his voice stretch out and find some range that's largely lacking on "Lion's Mane" and "Bird Stealing Bread." On "Faded from the Winter" and "Southern Anthem," he uses vocal overdubs to harmonize with himself, occasionally recalling the harmonies of Simon & Garfunkel or Crosby, Stills & Nash.

And Beam proves himself a more than capable instrumentalist, tossing in banjo solos and slide guitar work without stealing attention away from the rest of the song — a feat that even talented Built to Spill frontman Doug Martsch proved incapable of pulling off on his solo album earlier this year.

Yet for all the instrumental, vocal and lyrical variation on The Creek Drank the Cradle, it's a consistent affair. There's no getting around Iron & Wine's debut longplayer being a downtempo affair. As such, you can't clean the house to it, and you're not gonna take it to the beach, and you probably wouldn't take it on a drive, unless that drive involved some country roads. But for a plodding, semi-mopey bit of understated blues, it's hard to beat.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)