Woman King

Aside from the immediacy and intimacy of his recorded work, there is one thing (aside from the evidently ceaselessly noteworthy fact that he sports a beard…) clear about Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam: he is wonderfully prolific. In just short of 2 1/2 years he has released 2 albums (2002’s The Creek Drank the Cradle and 2004’s Our Endless Numbered Days) and (with this and 2003’s The Sea and the Rhythm) two EPs. Recorded in August 2004 with Brian Deck at his Engine Studios, Iron & Wine’s latest release is striking both for its broadened palette (percussion, piano, violin, electric guitar) and its thematic focus on female characters both archetypal and personal. The latter is mostly coincidental, a larger batch of songs yielding recurrent imagery when pared down for this EP. The increasingly complex beauty of Iron & Wine’s albums might best be summed up by the following, from SPIN (in a review of Our Endless Numbered Days):“…Beam is a fearlessly accessible songwriter, framing his melancholy in concrete imagery and solid, inviting melodies. He writes with the self-confidence of a man at peace with his gauzy gifts. He sings like a father talking to a child he respects or like a husband to a wife he adores. Beam has given us his second straight masterwork: self-assured, spellbinding and richly, refreshingly adult.” Here’s the third.

This six-track EP sees Sam Beam go electric. Recorded with producer Brian Deck, Woman King inches Beam away from his scratchy lo-fi origins without sacrificing any of the microphone-eating intimacy that made his work so appealing to begin with.

Anyone still hoping that Sam Beam and Iron & Wine will ever go back to the lo-fi sound of their first album might as well give up on that pipe dream.

The only surprise greater than the apparitional appearance of Iron & Wine's The Creek Drank the Cradle in 2002 -- figuratively out of nowhere,...