eMusic Review 0
Every artistic cliché has a remarkable artist behind it, and the current crop of sensitive, bearded, poetic acoustic singer-songwriters has an original: Sam Beam of Iron & Wine. His second album is a hushed, perceptively observed thing, on which he and his band play as softly as they can manage, a strategy that's worked for a handful of kindred spirits over the past few decades, from Nick Drake to Elliott Smith. ("Sunset Soon Forgotten" could be a sequel to Drake's "Northern Sky.") What gives this record its enduring power, though, isn't its pastoral tone but its enormous restraint: It's easy to imagine the group's fingerpicked guitars and barely-touched percussion holding back something huge and terrible. Beam's lyrics can be sentimental, but sometimes genuine darkness creeps up through them &@8212; see, for instance, the specter of violence that the utopian vision "Teeth in the Grass" can't shake off, or the refrain of "Sodom, South Georgia": "Papa died Sunday and I understood/ All dead white boys say, 'God is good.'"
