The brainchild of ex-Okkervil River member Jonathan Meiburg and friends, Shearwater will bring their indie rock soundscapes to Castaways on April 2nd at 8:00. Rounding out the bill will be their friends Wye Oak and The Hospital Ships (Shearwater touring member Jordan Geiger’s solo project). Button up for a night of beautifully woven songs of quiet majesty. In the meantime, check out Shearwater’s new track, aptly titled “Castaways” Tickets are on sale at the usual spot for $12 adv/$15 dos.

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Shearwater continue to explore the beauty, menace, and fragility of the natural world – and that increasingly rare species, the indivisible album – on The Golden Archipelago, the band’s most absorbing and accomplished work to date. The new record is the third panel of a triptych that includes 2006’s enigmatic Palo Santo and 2008’s acclaimed Rook, albums linked by themes of environmental and personal decay and humans’ impact on nature. In The Golden Archipelago, Shearwater turn to a portrait of life on islands – a world of alternating lushness and austerity, numinous silences and sudden cataclysms, and the strange flowerings of plant, animal, and human life that only arise in isolation. These are intimate subjects for songwriter Jonathan Meiburg. As a researcher, he’s camped on islands at the edges of the world, including the Falklands, Tierra del Fuego, the Galapagos, Madagascar, Nunavut, and New Zealand’s Chatham Islands, and once spent a few surreal months in a remote Aboriginal settlement in northern Australia. Adding his grandfather’s WWII experiences as a radio operator in the South Pacific to these travels gave Meiburg plenty of fodder for the songs of The Golden Archipelago, in which he weaves these times and places together with common feelings of wonder, grief, and defiance.

The Golden Archipelago opens with the first strains of the anthem of Bikini Atoll, sung by Bikinians in exile on the islet of Kili, where they’ve lived since atomic tests left their home uninhabitable. It’s a fitting introduction to the gentle, eerie “Meridian”, with its depiction of an air raid on an island garrison. From there, Shearwater take us on an island-hopping journey of spectacular contrasts, from the distant heights of “Landscape at Speed” to the snowy expanses of “Hidden Lakes”, from the manic, shuddering confines of “Corridors” to the isolated vistas of “Castaways”. It’s an album of lofty goals and great risk, but Shearwater have never been afraid to dream in widescreen. Like Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, Husker Du’s Zen Arcade, or Pink Floyd’s polarizing opus The Final Cut, The Golden Archipelago’s beautifully and strangely-wrought musical textures summon a majesty, drama, and individuality that few current records attain, or even attempt.

The band worked for months with producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Black Mountain, Polyphonic Spree, Explosions in the Sky) to capture the thrilling dynamics that have always marked their live performances, burnished by subtle orchestrations and cascades of mallet percussion. The results are singular, revelatory, and demand to be appreciated as a whole. Islands under siege, islands of impenetrable solitude, islands of the world and islands of the mind – all are here in The Golden Archipelago, whose shores and reefs flicker and beckon, even as they crumble under rising seas.

WYE OAK
Andy Stack and Jenn Wasner spent much of the first Wye Oak record, If Children, submerging their songs of youthful love and dread in a distortion haze, but the band’s new record, The Knot, starts with a bell. From the first clarion-clear note, Wye Oaks collective vision is sharpened on The Knot, a set of songs that sway, stretch, and scream while always reaching outward for personal connection.
As ever, Stacks production layers his own multi-instrumental arrangements over Wasner’s woozy compositions, but musically, too, things sound more precise. There is perhaps less squalling feedback than before, but lingering violin and pedal steel bring out the droning Americana that has always informed Wye Oak’s sound. If Children may not have had anything quite as dark and harrowing as ‘Mary Is Mary’, The Knots‘ nearly eight-minute centerpiece, but the band has rarely been so blissfully shimmering as on ‘I Want for Nothing’ or ‘Talking About Money’, in which a single-note melodica pattern is willed into a powerful, emotive hook. Throughout The Knot, Wasner’s lyrics explore the metaphorical possibilities of the album’s title, assessing the ways voluntary and otherwise that our ties to other people define our experiences. The Knot encompasses romantic possibility as well as unromantic obligation.
Wye Oak started as two friends recording songwriting demos together, but their basement project has since evolved to include tours of America and Europe, and a home on legendary label Merge Records. The Knot reflects that burgeoning confidence and comfort while maintaining the intimacy and emotional directness that are the band’s hallmarks. Only good things can come of a band this curious, honest, and oblivious to current trends. Pay attention.

THE HOSPITAL SHIPS
Review from NPR
Hospital Ships founder and sole member Jordan Geiger has a long, varied indie-rock resume, with stints as the trumpeter in Shearwater and the chief songwriter of Minus Story. On his first album as a solo artist, Oh, Ramona, Geiger showcases his artistic progress while displaying remarkable tenderness. His concisely drawn songs get fleshed out in these weepy bedroom recordings, rendered with more than just crackly, near-whispered vocals and gentle strums on an acoustic guitar.

Oh, Ramona’s title track unfurls slowly over the course of a sublime three minutes, buttressed by layered instrumentation and a flair for the experimental that recalls The Flaming Lips. (Geiger named Hospital Ships after a song on that band’s 1995 album Clouds Taste Metallic.) Before “Oh, Ramona” is over, Geiger has even unveiled a swell of horns to go with his oscillating chord progressions.

Inevitably, Geiger has earned comparisons to Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, thanks to their shared Midwestern roots and emotive lyrics. But with Oberst coming of age musically, Hospital Ships’ makes an ideal heir apparent: Oh, Ramona is rooted firmly in Geiger’s “not a boy, not yet a man” phase. Fortunately, Geiger doesn’t take himself nearly as seriously. The real-life Ramona in “Oh, Ramona”? The singer’s cat.