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Shearwater

Rook | Matador
By ZETH LUNDY  |  June 24, 2008
3.0 3.0 Stars
shearwaterinside.jpg
When the winds change in Rook, the fifth album from Shearwater, Jonathan Meiburg’s voice plummets from a heavenly coo to a throaty bluster slathered in slapback echo. He’s navigating the temporal flux of his band’s Southern Gothic baroque pop — twinkles of hammered dulcimers and glockenspiels that give way to the thud of electric guitars and drums, the strings and woodwinds that stabilize the otherwise inclement subtext, the rising moons and setting suns and crashing waves. And birds — oh God, the birds. (Meiburg, a noted birdwatcher, fills his lyrics with ornithological omens and motifs.) To fans of the Austin band, this is all par for the beautiful but eerie course. Rook is flush with the hallmarks of Shearwater’s style, from high-wire drama to near-hymnal stillness. Although its songs aren’t as uniformly good as those on 2006’s Palo Santo, its command of atmosphere is masterful, from the undulations of the seven-minute “Home Life” to the taut swamp rock of “Century Eyes.” On “The Snow Leopard,” the band find that hair-raising middle ground where introspection leads to commotion, and a song becomes a little tempest.
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