Shearwater
Palo Santo

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The first Shearwater release to be made up entirely of songs by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Meiburg,  It's a thrilling, paradoxical record—icily warm, welcoming and threatening, sloppy and immaculate.  The album was inspired by the life of Warhol muse and Velvet Underground collaborator, Nico. This 2007 Matador release is a completely refurbished 2-disc version of the original 2006 Misra/Fargo CD.  Five of the original 11 tracks have been entirely re-recorded, and the second disc includes four new songs (including the Skip James cover ‘Special Rider Blues’) and demo versions of four Palo Santo tracks. There is also new artwork and deluxe packaging. Shearwater will have a CD of all-new material in early 2008.Given that this is the first Shearwater record on which Meiburg's is the only voice singing lead, it's surprising how varied the vocals on ‘Palo Santo’ are. Far from a standard-issue indie-rock mumbler, Meiburg's expressive voice leaps with grace. The lyrics start out clear and direct, but soon become abstract and indecipherable; there's a comparable tension in the instrumentation, where antique organs cozy up against a quartet of harmonized shortwave radios, and arpeggiated banjos battle the world's most hideous-sounding fuzz bass.  Arrangements, too, crystallize into perfect harmony only to be cracked open again by dissonance. There seems to be some kind of narrative thread, but it's broken, frayed, frozen, with a persistent sense of mystery.

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