Full Circle
by lynn rapoport

Here on earth

I'D BEEN LOOKING forward to the fourth Butchies album, to Devendra Banhart's second coming, to the day when rumors of a Pixies reunion tour would at last prove true. But none of these events, once come to pass, have inspired the kind of agitated, almost sick feeling I got the afternoon Iron and Wine's Our Endless Numbered Days finally came in the mail.

On the subject of second comings, I'd had almost two years, from his first release to his latest, to turn idolatrous and impatient where Sam Beam, the songwriter behind Iron and Wine, was concerned. I don't want to get carried away with the messiah thread. But Beam is, after all, a bearded, hippie-looking guy who poses for photos with a calm, unsmiling expression that might bring you inner peace too if you spent your days sifting through press pics of musical young men and women doing their best to appear sullen, dangerous, shy, horny, or ready for their comeback.

If Beam cares about comebacks, the fate of his second full-length, or the turns his career might take in the wake of its arrival, he's keeping his opinions to himself. In past interviews the event of anybody knowing his name or the sound of his voice comes across like the pleasant, unlooked-for result of campaigns taken up by other, interested parties, while he stayed home in a studio for one and did what he does best.

What he's done best so far, as far as I can tell, never having taken a film class at the Miami college where he spends his daylight hours instructing, is write songs in a language that's somehow tender and terrible, illustrative and obscure at the same time. What he's done best is sing them, accompanied by a folky, plaintive guitar, in a low, tempered voice that somehow shows no signs of restraint, a softened, almost lazy-sounding enunciation slurring none of the words, his vocals dropping at times to a gorgeously tuneful whisper. On his first album for Sub Pop, The Creek Drank the Cradle, and again a year later on the EP The Sea and the Rhythm, and even on the Postal Service EP Such Great Heights, where he covers the title track to stunning, knee-weakening effect, Beam sings the way angels would if they existed and understood anything about the world we live in.

So it was strange that, after all the waiting, when Our Endless Numbered Days first arrived, I had trouble listening to it. I kept waiting for the same precise astounded feeling that remained after months of playing The Creek Drank the Cradle, whose songs you might listen to and break your heart over but never understand, their appalling, powers of transfixion running through both melody and lyric. Tracks like "Upward over the Mountain" and "Muddy Hymnal" from the earlier album kept drifting into the frame, getting underfoot. I guess that's the problem with a second coming.

One practical issue is the order of tracks on Days. There's nothing you'd want less than to disrupt the mood Beam can set by singing, but the album seems ready to end at least twice before actually doing so: first with the slow-starter "Radio Days," where Beam's vocals, joined with his sister Sarah Beam's, are at their most unearthly, and finally with the equally gorgeous "Passing Afternoon." A few tracks, lacking in those properties that gave almost every song on The Creek their sweet, peculiar staying power, are unfortunately lodged up front. There is the familiar guitar rising and falling in "On Your Wings," and the poetry of a line about "guns growing out of our bones," but it feels like a slight beginning to an album with heavy hopes pinned on it. The next track, "Naked As We Came," sounds like a pretty enough love song you might have heard somewhere on the radio dial but has a gash running all the way through it, surfacing in the morbid, fatal certainty of the lyric "one of us will die inside these arms ... one will spread our ashes around the yard."

Still, these problems seem smaller every time I hear a song like "Sodom, South Georgia," with its funeral and acre of bones, or the third track, "Cinder and Smoke," sad and gently frightening in its bare sketch of family tragedy. Here, where a fire eats up what remains visible of longtime disaster and a sense of terror arrives early in a line that holds no seeming cause for alarm, the album fairly loses its grip on the earth, and it barely matters where we started off and where we will end. Iron and Wine play with Holopaw and Patrick McKinney April 9, 9 p.m., Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, S.F. $13-$15. (415) 885-0750.