Desert-noir chameleons Calexico team up with contemporary folksinger Sam Beam, who performs as Iron and Wine, in a seven-track "extended play" (EP) CD that works extremely well. Beam, a former teacher and sometime film-maker based in Florida, makes Southern-style music whose muscularity is belied by his hushed vocal style. Music writers have been rightly criticized for trotting out the Nick Drake comparison for every young male folkie who sings quiet, emotion-packed songs, but in Beam's case, the comparison is fairly apt. And it helps make sense of this collaboration, since Calexico frontman Joey Burns has a similar low-key singing style, and the band has already covered one Drake song, "Clothes of Sand," on 2001's tour-only CD Aerocalexico.
I don't know how Iron and Wine fans will feel as they approach In the Reins. As a Calexico fan, I was very curious to see how it would work, and I must admit a bit skeptical. The first two tracks, "He Lays in the Reins" and "Prison on Route 41," did little to dispel that skepticism at first blush. Both are fairly quiet and low-key affairs, and made little initial impression except for the verse sung passionately in Spanish by guest vocalist Salvador Duran, a Tucson painter and mariachi-style singer, on the first track.
Then track three, "A History of Lovers," kicks off with a mid-tempo rock beat and an instantly catchy melody. It's a harrowing song of a love triangle in which one man dies and another goes to prison in irony-laden circumstances, set to a jaunty tune, with soulful horns in the masterful arrangement. And things just keep getting better.
"Red Dust" is a finger-picked Delta blues with a dead boy and a guitar and the devil, with an insistent, driving rhythm courtesy of Calexico's John Convertino. "Sixteen, Maybe Less" is an achingly nostalgic song about young lovers and how their love fades away, leaving only the longing: "And though an autumn time lullaby / sang our newborn love to sleep / I dreamt I traveled and found you there / in the woods one Christmas eve, waiting . . ." "Burn That Broken Bed" is another quiet but emotion-packed meditation on loss and longing, with a repeated line of "when are you coming back?"
The final track is a sad gem of more loss. "Dead Man's Will" finds a man already in the grave wishing he had done more to let others know he loved them. It starts with just an acoustic guitar accompanying multi-part harmonizing, adding vibes, drums and more, slowly, appropriately, until it's a multi-layered tone-poem played in a big, empty, echoing space.
After the rest of the album has won me over, I now find that those two opening tracks, still subtle, are now on a par with the other songs. "Reins" is a poetic meditation on love using the horse as a metaphor for struggle and rest; the protagonist of "Prison" sings in an Appalachian-style ballad his gratitude for a woman whose love has kept him from the vices that claim the rest of his family.
The CD's packaging is simple, but thankfully includes the lyrics, which are all-important to a full appreciation of Sam Beam's deceptively simple songs.
In the Reins is a quietly powerful little masterpiece of Americana.
