The Great Awakening
The first album in six years from Jonathan Meiburg and co. returns to the band’s patient style of baroque, naturalistic art-rock.
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Shearwater's 'The Great Awakening' is a mostly plodding creation whose intriguing nuances and insights are marred by musical tedium and hollowness.
Way back in 2014, the ornithologist announced that he’d be writing a book about a South American bird of prey called the caracara, drawing on his travels to South America to study the bird he’d become fascinated with in the ‘90s, when he first encountered them in the Falkland Islands. A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey (or, as Meiburg would have preferred it to be called, The Feathered People) was finally released just a year ago — seven years after he signed the contract to write it. On top of that, he’s made two albums with Emily Cross and Dan Duszynski of Cross Record under the name Loma. With that in mind, it can’t be shocking that his main passion, his long-running psychedelic art-folk band Shearwater, hasn’t made an album since 2016’s Jet Plane & Oxbow. How can you blame him? He’s been hanging out with birds and exploring different sonic landscapes too much to make a Shearwater record.
The natural world is filled with terrifying, beautiful, and unknowable spectacles, and so it makes sense that avowed nature lover and well-known ornithophile Jonathan Meiburg would mold the ongoing sound of Shearwater around these primal themes and associations. On past records, he’s always used his innate understanding of rhythmic theatricality and a particularly haunting voice