Review: The Golden Archipelago Another Stunner from Shearwater

To praise an album for its wholeness is an act tinged with heartbreak in this age of soundbytes and singles. Even the most marketable three-minute pop ditty is likely to be dissected down to a single chorus swell most recognizable from a car commercial. Though it seems like more young people profess an addiction to music than ever before, you have to wonder what fraction of them still lie on the floor spending hours doing nothing else but devouring an album whole.

It’s rare to hear criticism for Austin’s Shearwater- if anything trumps rock that seems to come natural and easy in the makings of a critics’ darling, it’s rock that seems naturally complex. But the complaint most often launched against Jonathan Meiburg’s project is either that his arcane lyrics are too difficult or that his vocals are too operatic. The Golden Archipelago is third in a trilogy of albums in the true sense from Shearwater, and more than any of the others turns these two complaints on their head. Anachronism seems all the more poignant—less a style than a holistic outcropping of the band’s substance—in the world reconstructed on The Golden Archipelago.

It’s the lost world of the Falklands, Madgascar, the Bikini Atoll, and Tierra Del Fuego, upended first by war and then by climate change, which are brilliantly equated with one another on this project. It’s no wonder many of its best tracks have the overtones of a battle cry. It’s a world that can’t help but evoke Darwin’s discoveries, and as Meiburg has written, begs the question of whether our evolutionary success as a species will ultimately cost us not only the “lost worlds” of the likes of Jules Verne and remote island paradises, but the sustainability of the most everyday ground beneath our feet. And The Golden Archipelago works together as a whole so well that the full-color, 75-page, 8 x 10.5” accompanying dossier of records, photos, and ephemera assembled by Meiburg seems an entirely natural and wholly unpretentious extension of the listener’s experience.

2008’s Rook earned every bit of the considerable praised heaped upon it, and The Golden Archipelago will not disappoint, though that obnoxious term “grower” will likely be thrown about; Golden Archipelago has left behind some of the down-to-earth populism of Rook en route to an ephemeral, remote tribalism. Though Meiburg’s voice, swooping as agile as a swallow, is here as always at the helm, the most immediate leap forward to be heard on the new album is Thor Harris’ brilliant percussion more at the foreground. There is always turbulence just under the placid surface of Shearwater songs, but Meiburg’s voice never cedes control, holding everything in place as if by sheer magnetic force. So the primal pull of the cerebral Shearwater sound falls entirely to the drums.Regardless of longtime fans’ ultimate album preferences, there’s common cause to celebrate that The Golden Archipelago more than any other before approaches the dynamics of the Shearwater sound live.

The video for album highlight "Hidden Lakes" gorgeously represents the signature Shearwater air of the ominous lullaby. Not to pretend to have the storyline pegged here, but it seems to revolve around a vagabond military deserter having renounced violence and fled only to find himself inescapably confronted by fellow humans' violent, sacrificial lamb mentality. Could be a metaphor for our society's attitude toward the environment, with the argument that anti-consumerism is the modern equivalent for military desertion in an economy so closely tied to wartime production. But hell, in any case we hardly need an excuse to watch Jonathan Meiburg carry an adorable tiny dog around in a basket.

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