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Iron & Wine
Sometime when his original, indie nerd fan base wasn’t looking, Sam Beam, aka Iron & Wine, moved from the deeply intimate, lo-fi singer-songwriter, home-recorded folk gorgeousness to, well, becoming something that sounds awfully close to a jam band.
Know this: It’s working almost brilliantly.
Too many jam bands prize instrumental virtuosity and rhythms that drift from “backbeat” to “meander” over chewy songwriting. (There’s a reason that some of the Grateful Dead’s strongest material was Dylan covers.) Beam has avoided this by starting with songcraft and blowing it out, adding percussion, electric guitars, throbbing, soulful electric bass and large caliber rock drumming. It’s more Neil Young than Phish, and that makes all the difference.
Opening his Saturday night set on the Heineken Stage with the acoustic “Sodom, South Georgia” as a duet with his sister/backup singer/violinist, Beam quickly moved to electric material, offering often radical rethinks of some of his indie classics. “Woman King,” already possessed of a tough polyrhythmic groove, roared to life in the six-piece band’s hands, a juggernaut of sword-in-hand feminism, Beam’s whisper occasionally breaking into full throated singing — big swing, big beat and Beam’s big beard all in full effect.
But “Upwards over the Mountain,” a son-to-mother plea for understanding capable of reducing cynical men to tears in its original form, suffered slightly from its rural electrification. Its new arrangement is powerful and well-designed, but nowhere near as intimate. It was hard to tell whether other songs were reboots or new material, although, either way, the crowd loved them.
He was wise to close with a sure-fire crowd pleaser, the nine-minute acoustic epic “The Trapeze Swinger” from the movie “In Good Company.” As Beam and his sister played, it was clear that the new Beam was pretty much the same as the old Beam. As I recall, some guy named Dylan made this move work pretty well, too.
(photo by Jay Janner AMERICAN-STATESMAN)
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