Blowin' Indie Wind

Author: Erika Mercer

When I say this album puts you to sleep, I mean it in the best sense possible. On my first listen, I wasn't even able to make it beyond the third song before my eyes started closing, but ever since that moment, I haven't wanted to listen to anything else - or do anything else, for that matter.

In the same way that a hypnotist dangles his golden pocket watch before your eyes, Sam Beam, the one-man show behind Iron & Wine, uses his guitar, banjo and voice to lull and dazzle you into a dreamstate. Beam's delicate, overlapping harmonies wash over you like the hypnotist's whispering voice, instructing you to count backwards from 10, gently coaxing you into a world from which only the music can release you.

Beam's hypnotic skills only became known to the world in September 2002, when he released his first album, "The Creek Drank the Cradle," a side project the Miami Beach film professor had long been perfecting. Though he recorded the album in his home on a basic four-track device, Beam exploited its modest production, making the inevitable background noises and gentle hiss of the tape seem both fitting and intentional. Together with his gentle voice, which melts like caramel over the tops of the songs, and the bittersweet twangs of his banjo and guitar, these home-cooked noises and hisses provide the album with an irresistible flavor.

Which is why, when it came time to release the companion piece, "The Sea & the Rhythm," this past September, Beam stuck with the same ingredients. This 25-minute EP is culled from home-sessions between 1999 and 2002 - the same sessions from which he gathered the songs for his first album. These five new songs, while not flaunting any new tricks, are nevertheless solid and beautiful. If you liked "The Creek Drank the Cradle," Beam's new release won't let you down.

The album's first song, "Beneath the Balcony," opens with a gentle stumble, as drunken chords saunter onstage, tripping happily over their own feet. Beam's voice soon joins them - "Let's go out and dance, darling / Our last of days / And grace the game with a blindfold on / The cheaters came to play" - breathing irony and gentle sarcasm over the tipsy chords. From there, the lyrics go on to relate a cryptic parable of a warrior reduced to a beggar - made denser, as many of Beam's lyrics are, by religious overtones.

Following "Beneath the Balcony" is the album's title song, "The Sea & the Rhythm," a beautiful, seductive tale of lovemaking, in which Beam parallels the ocean's movement with the rhythm of his and his lover's bodies. For instance, he begins the song with the phrase, "Tonight we're the sea and the salty breeze," and later completes the parallel with, "And salty my sweat and fingertips." Hushed but intense, the song, like a cool breeze, will both soothe you and make goose bumps rise on your skin.

Another noteworthy song is "Jesus the Mexican Boy," the fourth song on the album. Unlike the majority of Beam's lyrics, which remain relentlessly mysterious and impenetrable, this song's lyrics are surprisingly concrete. He tells a narrative about a boy who provides comfort through simple acts of kindness and generosity yet is eventually betrayed by a friend (note the biblical reference to Judas). Despite this act of betrayal, though, the boy immediately forgives his friend, and in the end kisses him "like a brother." While the religious allegory in this song is clear, most of the time, Beam's lyrics are too dense and ambiguous to lend themselves to a simple interpretation - one never gets the sense that he is forcing the religious aspects of his lyrics on the listener.

"The Sea & the Rhythm" remains faithful to its title - it laps gently and rhythmically against your ears, numbing you into a peaceful state until you feel as though you are floating back and forth, rising and falling in cadence with its soft sounds. So I warn you - do not press play if you have anywhere to be in a hurry, anything that needs to be done immediately, anybody you need to conduct witty or rapid conversation with in the near future. But otherwise, keep your ears on the rhythm and let yourself be hypnotized.