Iron & Wine

Colors. Shapes. Rhythms.

Think of the stereotypical indie songwriter and you picture some bearded, more or less depressed guy moaning to his own acoustic guitar. Beard aside, Sam Beam doesn't let himself be pigeonholed so easily: just listen to the dense brushstrokes of his latest work under the Iron & Wine name, "The Shepherd's Dog", to realize as much. A wealth of nuances that widens the chromatic spectrum of his songwriting soul, revealing itself onstage as even more magnetic and engaging.

Behind the hippie look, Sam Beam's gaze reveals a vivid, bright light that instantly grabs your attention. It's his sister Sarah's violin that acts as a prologue with the sweetness of her singing, immediately followed by pedal steel, electric double bass, accordion and percussion. And when Beam's own gentle, caressing voice joins in, "Lovesong Of The Buzzard" makes its way forward like a dream in which Elliott Smith and The Band magically find themselves sharing the same stage.

With the support of a handful of exceptional musicians, Iron & Wine reinterprets "The Shepherd's Dog" in full, offering each track continual shifts in perspective: "Peace Beneath The City" becomes a blues with carnal fibers, "Wolves (Song Of The Shepherd's Dog)" floats hazily over a slow unfurling, "Innocent Bones" takes on a rarefied guise, relying at first solely on Sarah Beam's subtle backing vocals and Paul Niehaus of Lambchop's pedal steel.

The true architect of the band's magmatic sound, however, lurks in the background: it's Ben Massarella of Califone, tirelessly tinkering with his percussion to draw out a seething mix of beats, clangs and accents, always with a possessed expression peeking out from behind the hair covering his forehead.

Some of the most intense moments of the evening come from past material, from a "Sodom, South Georgia" given a West Coast air by accordion and brushes, to a powerful "Woman King", propelled by Matt Lux's pulsing bass. "Upward Over The Mountain" even surfaces from Iron & Wine's debut, "The Creek Drank the Cradle", and comes across as a bright, crystalline breath of piano and pedal steel.

The songs bleed into one another, joined by digressions that are by turns acidic and sharp. The dreamlike coda of "Carousel" leads into a nocturnal "Cinders And Smoke", which could belong to the Dylan of "Oh, Mercy". "House By The Sea" ignites the crowd's enthusiasm with the Caribbean scents of Chad Taylor's drumming, and for a moment the ocean horizon seems to wipe away the relentless rain of the Milan night. Amid funky accelerations and sudden slowdowns, a languid "The Devil Never Sleeps" blossoms; then Beam turns his back to the audience and improvises once more over the band's rhythms, until a driving "White Tooth Man" takes shape.

In the end, Beam's voice rises thin in a rapt silence to intone the fragile waltz of "Flightless Bird, American Mouth": time seems to stop in a held breath, until his sister's voice joins his to bring in a stirring crescendo.

When Beam comes back onstage for the only encore, he's alone with his acoustic guitar, but nothing more is needed to recreate the enchantment of "Naked As We Came", its nostalgic sense of impermanence, arpeggiated in the style of Simon & Garfunkel, leading the audience to join in a half-voiced chorus. "Eyes wide open, naked as we came / One will spread our ashes round the yard".

In the end, an artist is nothing more than this: the naked heart of a man.

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