Shearwater’s Jet Plane And Oxbow is an album that looks backward—to the recording technologies and sounds of the early ’80s—in order to interrogate the present and to contemplate the future. Shearwater’s moody, thoughtful style, built around Jonathan Meiburg’s dramatic, beautiful voice, turned toward rock with 2012’s Animal Joy, which now sounds like a stopover in the flight path toward Jet Plane. Meiburg used period-specific instruments; his guitar playing alludes to Adrian Belew’s work with David Bowie and Robert Fripp’s with Peter Gabriel; he integrates the stark sounds of Joy Division and early New Order. But the goal wasn’t nostalgia. Jet Plane doesn’t sound retro, nor does it sound like an homage. The allusions are there to create a sonic parallel to our time. Meiburg will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Shearwater feature.
Meiburg: I still don’t understand why this documentary didn’t win the Oscar two years ago. It’s the story of an young American named Matt VanDyke, who graduated from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in 2004 with a master’s degree in “securitystudies” and went home to live in his mother’s basement for a few months, where he dreamed up a quest he thought would give him a “crash course in manhood”: a solo motorcycle trip across North Africa. For the next few years, VanDyke obsessively filmed himself on a journey that went way beyond North Africa; we see Matt accosted by an angry crowd in Afghanistan, hanging with U..S troops in Iraq, crashing his bike, over and over, in the deserts of Iran, and—finally—sneaking into Libya before returning home. This is all in the first 20 minutes of the film.
What happens next is so strange and startling that I won’t give it away, but suffice to say that Matt gives himself a new assignment that would be completely unbelievable if it weren’t true, and he films the whole thing. Director Marshall Curry (Street Fight, Racing Dreams, If A Tree Falls) is one of the best filmmakers in North America, and he pieces together Matt’s years of footage (and a single interview) into a suspenseful, mind-blowing meditation on personal and national myth-making, war, and OCD that ought to be mandatory viewing for every citizen of the United States. It’s also a great companion to the new season of Serial.
Video after the jump.
