Walking Far From Home – Iron & Wine Walking Far From Home – Iron & Wine (Free Download / Buy)

I generally don’t start my reviews with a disclaimer, but this seems appropriate.  I write  this review not as a die-hard Iron & Wine (@ironandwine) fan, but a casual listener. I have no loyalty to the way Sam Beam used to do things, though I do thoroughly enjoy The Creek Drank the Cradle, Around The Well, and Our Endless Numbered Days.

Beam’s latest effort, Kiss Each Other Clean, has been on constant rotation in my iTunes for a few days now.  From the get-go, I had mixed feelings.  I knew not to expect another “The Trapeze Swinger”, but it pains me to listen to the entirety of the album, realizing that it is clearly an experiment.  Just as Sufjan Stevens did with his 2010 album Age of Adz, Beam is expanding his musical repertoire, and while he is sometimes successful, I personally find Kiss Each Other Clean to be a change for the sake of change.

The album opens with the gorgeous track “Walking Far from Home”, a song with widespread appeal (I’m talking friends, moms, dads, and grandpas as well).  It’s composed and layered to perfection and delivers Beam’s signature narrative lyrical style that will grip listeners from the first line.  The following track, “Me and Lazarus”, is where it all went wrong with me.  Iron & Wine’s music has always struck me with it’s ability to convey so much with such simplicity.  With this song, and so many others on the album, there’s an obvious attempt to create something more dynamic, yet we’re left with sax solos that sound like a Kenny G song gone wrong.  I have nothing against the sax, but these solos are just bad and kill the beautiful landscape being painted by Beam.

This scenario plays out time and time again throughout Kiss Each Other Clean.  I have fallen in love with “Tree By the River”, “Half Moon”, and “Glad Man Singing”, but every other track has absolutely no appeal to me.  I won’t even start to tear into their funky OAR-collab (not really), “Big Burned Hand”.

Where this album falls flat is in its consistency.  In working out his new direction, Beam failed to create an album, and instead created a loosely connected series of tracks.