When we first met Sam Beam, it was kind of obvious from his hushed, solitary bedroom recordings that he didn’t get out of the house much. Three young children in the family will do that to you. But after the success of 2004’s Our Endless Numbered Days, Beam found himself on the road with a full band—and sometimes with much more than that, as witnessed on a carnivalesque tour with Calexico where upward of a dozen people might be onstage at any given time.
The Shepherd’s Dog finds the normally clean and lean Beam pigging out at the sonic candy store, with vocals run through Leslie speakers, harmoniums blended with slide guitars, hand drums and sitars, and backward tape loops underscoring pedal-steel swells. One track, “Wolves (Song Of The Shepherd’s Dog),” sounds like he hired Bill Laswell, Daniel Lanois and all their favorite session players for some dub excursions. Yet thankfully, in this case more is more, due to returning producer Brian Deck (Modest Mouse, Josh Ritter). Deck weaves psychedelic layers around the bluesy song structures and places Beam’s harmonies with sister Sarah front and center.
To keep The Shepherd’s Dog from becoming a total rock-redux incarnation of Iron And Wine, Beam leaves drum kits out of the picture, preferring subtle percussion that doesn’t weigh down the explorations. By maintaining his intimacy while armed with a full palette of colors, Beam sets himself far apart from the rest of the hush-and-shush crowd.
—Michael Barclay
