Review by Michael Bird
2/5
I like Iron & Wine a lot. I’ve liked pretty much everything Sam Beam has done, actually. My favourite Iron & Wine is the lo-fi early albums, The Creek Drank The Cradle especially, but I’ve enjoyed all the subsequent collaborations and EP’s that saw Beam graduate from minimalist guitars to standard indie arrangements to world music experiments. 2007’s The Shepherd’s Dog was the furthest Beam had strayed from his early work, but many of the endearing qualities of previous Iron & Wine albums (intimacy, most vitally) remained. Kiss Each Other Clean is another step away from Beam’s humble musical beginnings, but ultimately amounts to experimentation at the expense of quality.
Opener ‘Walking Far From Home’ is about a minute and a half too long, and highlights one of several shortfalls found on the album. Beam’s lyrical wheelhouse so far has been forlorn love songs, pastoral folksiness and nostalgia. If he’s been vague on character or events, he’s made up for it with a knack for striking imagery, and almost always left the listener with at least an impression of what any given song might be about. Here’s an abridged list of things Beam apparently saw when he was walking far from home; ‘a building high as heaven, rainclouds, little babies, lovers in a window, sickness blooming fruit trees, children in the river, a boat full of believers, sunlight on the water, flowers on a hillside, a car crash in the country, a white dog chase its tail, naked dancers in the city’. There’s plenty more, but you get the idea. Along with the crush of instruments trying to find room in the track, the vocal is just overwhelming and messy, and just keeps going. If brevity is the soul of wit…
Beam continues to widen his sonic palette on Kiss Each Other Clean, throwing everything from tenor saxophone to processed electronic warbling into songs. There’s no need to start yelling ‘Judas’ every time new sounds come into play, but Kiss Each Other Clean is almost track to track schizophrenic, never settling on a style and never really giving the new elements time to be explored and find their space. Beam doesn’t settle on a style long enough to give it his own signature, and as such a lot of the album sounds like a funk/jazz band featuring Beam on vocals, or a reggae group featuring Beam. By his own admission Beam was exploring sounds from the past and attempting to put together an album that would evoke the feeling of a few hours worth of 70’s radio (if you were on a decidedly weird and varied radio station, I suppose), but Kiss Each Other Clean pales in comparison in that regard to something like John Frusciante’s Shadows Collide With People or even Cee-Lo Green’s latest. Beam largely fails to put his own stamp on the sounds he is paying homage to, and it all sounds thrown together rather than carefully stitched together.
There are some enjoyable cuts on the album, the clean pop of ‘Tree By The River’ or the more familiar ‘Godless Brother In Love’. Again, there should be no expectation for an artist to recycle past formulas, but it feels as though Beam only really hits his stride when he’s playing with more familiar elements. Rousing final track ‘Your Fake Name Is Good Enough For Me’ is a glimpse of what could have been on the album, running long enough to let the novel elements (horns, a decidedly reggae/funk feel to the percussion) take root and build rather than just poke their head in the door before disappearing.
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