The Shepherd's Dog : Iron and Wine : Review : Rolling Stone

Singer-songwriter Sam Beam has gradually added rhythm and instruments to his gravitas across his previous records as Iron and Wine. On this third album, Beam finally brings the blood, instrumental colors and quirky but fluid arrangements that make explicit the worry and wounds running red in his Southern-gothic stories and dead-love letters. Slide guitars and buzzing sitars hang like spider's silk from "White Tooth Man." In "Carousel," Beam sings through a Leslie-organ effect, like George Harrison caught in the fog of "Blue Jay Way." "Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog)" is how David Essex's "Rock On" would have sounded if the Clash covered it on Sandinista! Beam uses these sparks and hooks to draw you closer to uncomfortable truths. "Innocent Bones" is a bossa nova about the sin of piety. "House by the Sea" laments the cruelty of separation with African highlife guitars. Beam is as unsure in love and dismayed by the world as always. But he has never sounded more alive.