XL MUSIC

Shearwater soars back to roost

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, May 29, 2008

When one calls Shearwater head cheese Jonathan Meiburg, one expects to talk about two things: Shearwater's music and birds. Not necessarily in that order.

"I'm getting coffee in Missoula, Montana," Meiburg says. He and the band — bassist Kim Burke, drummer Thor Harris and the new member, multi-instrumentalist Kevin Schneider — are on tour with Clinic, a British band Meiburg adores; Meiburg jumped at the chance to tour with them, especially as co-headliners with each band doing 45-minute sets.

Shearwater is playing some shows in advance of the Tuesday release of "Rook," the band's fifth album and first of all-new material on Matador Records, home of such indie rock titans as Pavement and Mogwai.

Thursday night at the Parish, the band will perform the entire record, with strings, woodwinds, a harp, the whole nine.

"I'm extremely excited about this show," Meiburg says. "I don't think Austin has ever seen these songs presented with their full arrangements."

Meiburg adds he was half-hoping Clinic would be obnoxious rock stars so he would like them a little less. "But, no," he sighs. "I'm sorry to report they're extremely nice."

There's a split second pause. You can practically hear his head whip around.

"Oh man! There's a raven sitting on top of this light pole making all sorts of crazy sounds!" Meiburg says. He's almost yelling into the phone with excitement. "I've never heard ravens make those sounds!"

See, Meiburg is a semipro ornithologist. Which is why his band is named after a medium-sized, long-winged seabird that can live for decades on end. Why his smart, stark new album is called "Rook," after a bird that nonornithological types would be forgiven for thinking looks an awful lot like a crow. Because it does.

After he graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., in 1998 as an English major, he won a Watson Fellowship to study, as he puts it, "civilization at the ends of the Earth," which led him to the Falkland Islands and Tierra del Fuego, where he fell in love with the striated caracara, a predatory bird that eats penguin chicks. He also holds a master's in geography from the University of Texas.

His bandmates are used to the bird thing, more or less. "We don't talk about it very much, obviously," he says. "I'll say something like 'I just saw a red-chested flicker' and there's this long silence."

NEW LIVES

Shearwater has been kicking around since 2001, when it was seen as an adjunct to Meiburg's other band, Okkervil River. Meiburg and Okkervil leader Will Sheff served in both bands and the bands were on different wings of the Secretly Canadian family of labels, Okkervil on Jagjaguwar, Shearwater on Misra. Shearwater released three albums and an EP over four years on Misra.

These days, everyone is in a far different place than they were when the bands started. Meiburg and Burke are no longer a couple. She lives in Boston, pursuing a career as a playwright and contends that her role as cellist is exactly the same as her role in the theater. "Both jobs provide something that other people play over," she says. "Here's the template and actors or the band add their own input."

Thor Harris is the band's most senior member, a fortysomething vet of such acts as Smog, Angels of Light, Swans and Devendra Banhart. And yes, sometimes he feels like the older sibling.

"I try not to be too much like that, but there is a little bit of that," Harris says. "We really have different kinds of brains and they complement each other. Kim and Jonathan are academic types and have incredible memories. I have what they call common sense." (It is absolutely impossible to tell if Harris is making fun of his bandmates here; his voice is so casual as to completely resist sarcastic inflection.)

Harris loves the stark sound "Rook" employs. "(Denton-based engineer) Matt Barnhart recorded us just the way we sound. On 'Palo Santo,' we worked with my old bandmate Craig Ross (they were in Stickpeople together) who adds a lot of sounds, tons of effect and manipulates sounds. We didn't really do that on this record. The sounds we were already making were interesting enough."

These days, Okkervil is clearly Jagjaguwar's flagship band; Sheff hasn't played with Shearwater for years. The band's final Misra record "Palo Santo" (2006) was partially rerecorded and totally re-released by Matador last year. It was the first Shearwater album to be totally written by Meiburg.

" 'Palo Santo' stood out to me as something that was fully realized," Matador co-owner Gerard Cosloy says. "They seemed to have a much broader vision in place. I was pretty content to be a fan." When Shearwater became available, Matador and the band began to talk.

"Even before I found out the whole notion of ('Palo Santo') being a song cycle about (Velvet Underground chanteuse) Nico," Cosloy says, "I thought the way it flowed together from beginning to end made a real case for Shearwater being a monumentally great band."

Earlier this year, Meiburg split with Okkervil once and for all. Howard Draper, the multi-instrumentalist who was a crucial part of Shearwater's sound, split after "Rook" was recorded.

Meiburg says there are no hard feeling between himself and Sheff. "We have a great sympathy for what each other are doing," Meiburg says, noting that Sheff helped sequence the elegantly paced "Rook" when Meiburg had hit a wall.

END TIMES

Despite being in a band with his ex-wife and having just quit a successful band, Meiburg has always said he doesn't like writing about himself, instead finding solace in nature. "Rook" began that way, in fact.

"I got to go back to the Falkland Islands at the end of 2006," Meiburg says, a victory lap of the survey he made 10 years ago. "I felt like cheating death. I thought that was an experience I'd never get to have again. Out in the field, the mind can sort of wander."

He was listening to Bob Dylan's "Live '64" album when he heard the line "No sound ever comes from inside the gates of Eden."

"It didn't really have anything to do with sin," he says. "But I began to think about the idea that there are things that are hidden or closed forever."

If "Palo Santo" was the cold interior of one person, "Rook" is an exterior view, music that doesn't seem quite as remote. The production is more naked, but it's also more human. And like "Palo Santo," the album's 10 songs come in well under 45 minutes, a mitzvah to listeners in an era when albums stretch pointlessly past the hour mark.

Yet there's a studied melancholy in songs such as the title track, "Leviathan, Bound" and "The Snow Leopard" that's pretty impossible to deny. Is this Shearwater's "green" album? Well ...

To his credit, Meiburg keeps the clear-eyed view of the scientist. "Look, the old world is gone and it's not coming back," he says. "I think there's a sense on this album that we need to come to grips with that a little bit more, how we can understand that the world is changing profoundly, things are disappearing which will never come back again and now things are arriving, which we can't know or understand."

He pauses. It's a complicated idea. "I don't want to say that this is an attempt to make peace with that idea as much as it's an acknowledgement of it," Meiburg says.

"The thing that's so scary is not the idea that the end of the world is coming," he continues. "People have always found that a weirdly comforting thought. But I think the idea that the world might change beyond your ability to recognize or understand it anymore is very scary.

"Evangelical Christians seem to be embracing the idea of climate change now, which is funny because they have always been into the end times, but not climate change. But now, the end time might actually be arriving in a way that's kind of banal. They want the apocalypse on their own terms so that Jesus can come down from the sky. Like, it's just not OK for the planet to reject us." Meiburg sounds perfectly cheery when saying all this.

Or maybe it's just like poet T.S. Eliot said — not with a bang, but a whimper. Shearwater adds a keening croon, a lingering bass note, some percussive metal, some feedback. Then the planet goes on without us.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926.

CD release show

Shearwater will perform the new record 'Rook' in its entirety Thursday with strings, woodwinds and a harp. 8 p.m., the Parish, 214 E. Sixth St. $12. 478-6372.

Shearwater

'Rook'(Matador)

"Rook" starts with croon and some piano chords as Jonathan Meiburg softly laments "the death of the waters." A wave of sound crashes into the spare melody about halfway through as drums, guitar feedback, trumpets and strings — the album's whole palette — shows up at once. Then it fades away, the wave returning to the dying sea. Not a bad introduction to the most accessible work of Shearwater's career.

With "Rook" in the canon, "Palo Santo" — the band's previous album — feels like the kitchen-sinker, the sound of a band piling on the production butter in order to make a grand statement. (Which worked; "Palo Santo" ended up re-released by Matador Records in a deluxe, partially re-recorded, two-CD package.) "Rook" pares the sound back a bit without sacrificing complex, subtle arrangements.

Instrumentation includes piano, electric, acoustic and lap steel guitar, drums, vibraphone, glockenspiel, hammered dulcimer, lap steel guitar, horns and strings, and it's a credit to producer Matthew Barnhart and arranger Mark Sonnabaum that the album never sounds cluttered. The rich blend of strings and horns on "Leviathan, Bound" and "Rooks" (note the "s") heighten the mood rather than overwhelm it; the latter song is one of the most straightforward Shearwater's ever written and all the better for it.

But what is that mood? It is the resignation of "On the Death of the Waters?" Is it the almost punky defiance on "Century Eyes," all close-miked electric guitar, drum pound and Meiburg's belt? The death of the world as we know it is a complicated thing. Most of the time "Rook" makes it sound like a fait accompli. Let's hope not, but if it is, this is an excellent soundtrack.

— Joe Gross