Iron & Wine - Kiss Each Other Clean

On the release of his debut album ‘And the Creek Drank the Cradle’ in 2002, Sam Beam (aka Iron & Wine) was swiftly, if not entirely unfairly, lumped in with Will Oldham on the dark, beardy fringes of modern American folk. Okay, so it was a pretty dark folk album. And he did have a beard. Since then though, he has been stretching himself musically with increasingly audacious, and largely successful results.

From the graduation to a fuller band sound on his sophomore album ‘Our Endless Numbered Days’, he soon started exploring different avenues to sate his musical curiosity. His EP ‘In The Reins’ with Calexico can reasonably be seen as the turning point where he gained the confidence to throw whatever elements he fancied into the mix. His blending of more traditional folk with Mexican and Jazz styles paved the way for an even greater departure with ‘The Shepherd’s Dog’, Beam’s third full-length Iron & Wine recording, which saw him experimenting with African pop and dub style production to great effect. Whereas he was once compared with artists like Nick Drake, Elliott Smith and Simon & Garfunkel, he was now being spoken of as being in the same vein as Tom Waits - and there is no doubting that the two share a similar percussive instinct.

‘Kiss Each Other Clean’ opens with ‘Walking Far From Home’, on which Beam leads the listener on a vision quest through the modern world where he describes seeing ‘A car crash in the country / Where the prayers run like weeds along the road’ along with ‘Flowers on a hillside / And a millionaire pissing on the lawn’. This sense of juxtaposition continues throughout the album; ‘Tree By The River’ for instance recalls the innocent rapture of first love (‘Dark canyon road / I was coy in the half moon / Happy just to be near you / And you were happy for me’), the longing to recapture the feeling made all the more acute by the knowledge of it’s futility. It may not be a particularly showy or ear-catching vocal performance from Beam but it’s surely one of his most affecting yet.

The album comes to a close with the incantatory ‘Your Fake Name Is Good Enough For Me’ in which the listener is incited to ‘Become, The sinner and the saint… The bandage and the blade’. As in other moments on this album, there’s an almost religious intensity which plays nicely with the end of days musical backing.

While not everything on the album works as well as you might hope - the doo-wopping ‘Half Moon’ in particular seems out of place - when taken as a whole, ‘Kiss Each Other Clean’ easily holds it’s own against any of Beam’s previous material, which is pretty high praise. Most importantly though, it represents another jump forwards in terms of ambition and scope, and one that can only leave you guessing at where the future may take him.