Animal Joy
Jonathan Meiburg and co.'s latest album finds Shearwater dropping the arcane conceptual gambits of their recent "trilogy" and speaking in layman's terms emotionally and sonically.
Shearwater’s journey from a ramshackle Okkervil River sister act to one of indie rock’s foremost purveyors of chamber-pop drama is one of the past decade’s great musical evolutions. Animal Joy puts an exclamation point on the story, largely avoiding the airy, avian-themed introspection of the band’s recent efforts in…
Over the course of its decade-long life, Jonathan Meiburg's Shearwater has excelled in developing atmosphere and texture…
Shearwater have come a long way from their origins as a humble side project for songwriters and former Austin roommates Jonathan Meiburg and Will Sheff. In the past ten years, and over the course of seven albums, they've shed Sheff, who now focuses his attentions on Okkervil River, and with this latest offering they've almost shaken off their reputation as peddlers of Talk Talk-inspired downtempo songs of love and loss.
Shearwater’s three-album cycle that started with 2006’s Palo Santo and closed with 2010’s The Golden Archipelago—dubbed by the band as “The Island Arc”—explored a single musical and emotional commonwealth, driven by lush, almost progressive
‘Animal Joy’ is the ‘proper’ follow-up to 2010’s impressively prog ‘The Golden Archipelago’ (after last year’s set of self-released instrumentals).
Shearwater meld free-form pop and twisted blue-collar rock into their boldest album yet, writes <strong>Paul Mardles</strong>
<p>The florid melodrama of the Texan trio's early albums is replaced here with a sound unexpectedly redolent of 1980s testosterone rock, writes <strong>Maddy Costa</strong></p>