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: This hushed, fascinating documentary, which the director calls “a film about violence without violence,” follows the daily routines of people who work at the cemetery of the drug lords outside Juarez—a gaudy, monumental and eerily tranquil city of the dead. It’s a good counterpoint to this year’s Oscar-nominated, testosterone-loaded Cartel Land, which works similar territory but falls into adrenaline-junkie fetishizing of guns, violence and machismo. Almada’s film is about as un-Hollywood as you can imagine, but it’s never self-consciously arty or dull; it’s a haunting story of very real lives. And deaths.
Video after the jump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbyoG9xAr7g
