Shearwater: Rook

Okkervil River leapt to quasi-fame last year with the release of The Stage Names, an album chronicling the miseries, frustrations and rare pleasures of life on the indie rock's B-list. The Stage Names debuted to rapturous critical praise and sold over 10,000 copies in its opening week. Last month, keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Meiburg announced he was leaving Okkervil River to focus on the Shearwater, a project he co-founded with OR lead singer Will Sheff. (Sheff is no longer with the band.) Just as a rising tide was carrying all ships, Meiburg decided to jump overboard and make haste for the ocean floor. It's an admirable decision, one that officially declares that Shearwater is nobody's side project.

Their new album, Rook, makes it clear why Okkervil River's direction didn't jibe with Meiburg's vision. Instead of the solid, meaty songwriting, the clever lyrics and catchy choruses in which Sheff specializes, we have an album made up of bits and pieces, ebbs and floes of incidental noise and repeating loops -- not a sing-along in sight. It's less than six degrees away from melancholy cocktail party music -- for a moment it's tempting to dismiss the album as lovely sonic wallpaper, the sort of pretty, fragile snoozer that bands like Iron & Wine and Death Cab for Cutie churn out by the dozen. The first track, "On the Death of the Waters," is delicate, haunting, and barely audible -- it would fit comfortably on any number of lesser indie rock records -- until a deafening hi-hat crash, discordant horn blast and manic keyboard arpeggio rip unexpectedly through the quiet. Before long the volume falls out and we're left only with a distant tinkling piano, but notice has been served -- this will not be another album to fall asleep to.

The opener is immediately followed by the title song and single “Rook”, with its resolute percussion, and carefully enunciated vocals, understated yet confident, even commanding. The bridge is provided by a ominous trumpet sounding off in the distance somewhere -- an intruder from another song, come only to issue a few spacious brass notes of foreboding, then beat a hasty retreat back to the set of "For a Few Dollars More." Brimming with unexpected oddball moments like this, Rook is the rare album that that's quiet and mournful without once feeling lazy, predictable or detached.

Of course, all the starry-eyed abstraction can be a little much, and I sometimes miss the cinematic immediacy of Okkervil River. The lyrics are half balderdash, with a lot of psuedo-Keatsian rambling about falconers and leviathans, interrupted by sudden moments of startling, devastating directness. On "Home Life," when Meiburg sings "When you were a child you were a tomboy, and your mother laughed at the serious way you looked at her," the words feel much more lived-in and honest than all of his elliptical meditations on the natural world. (Meiburg is an ornithologist with a masters degree in geography, so his dedication to the land is at least genuine.) Mundane lines like these redeem all the poetry -- "Home Life" is an epic of nearly 8 minutes, and by the end, when the instruments begin to fall away and Meiburg sings "Horse without rider, lungs without breathing, day without light, a song without singing... a song," the words are both darkly frightening and warmly enveloping. The music is slinky and furrow-browed, and the singer sounds utterly lost. The poetry feels natural, not written, and we feel enraptured and alive, glad to be adrift in Meiburg's strange dream.

Ultimately, this effect of lyrical inconsistencies and shredded, patched-up songs feels less like a flaw than a unique vision. Rook is a troubled, difficult album, an album that resists intent listening and yet refuses to fade into the background. The way the soporific butts up against the electrifying in these etched-out, discordant lullabies creates the sense of twisting the radio knob on a dream. And if Meiburg’s radio-dreams are all of seascapes and archipelagoes, of birds plunging down through clouds that cling to salty cliffs -- Freudian clichés, to be sure, but lovely ones just the same -- we're no less lucky to be invited in through all that static, spume and spray.