Shearwater - The Canticle of the Creatures

Aren’t we lucky to live in this odd little world?

“Our destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things,” wrote Henry Miller. It was a journey that changed Jonathan Meiburg's view of reality forever: a journey to the ends of the earth. He had set out simply to discover the world, and came back with new eyes — and the music followed as a consequence.
As a child, Meiburg dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. If he could have had a superpower, he would have wanted to talk to animals. Maybe that's why, in college in Tennessee, he decided to devote himself to biogeography, researching the reasons why every living creature seems destined to inhabit a particular place on earth. His big chance came after graduation, when he won a fellowship from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, offering a year of travel "to promote one's genuine, independent engagement with the world's communities." His project? To study the life of human settlements in the planet's most remote corners: Australian Aboriginal villages, the Inuit of Baffin Island, the Chatham Islands in New Zealand, Tierra del Fuego... But it was in the Falkland Islands that the decisive encounter took place.

Wings spread against the crystalline blue, the vertigo of a dive toward the green outline of the coast. They call it "Johnny Rook," or striated caracara: "a cunning, charismatic, sociable raptor with very little fear of humans." Meiburg became fascinated by it after meeting English ornithologist Robin Woods in the Falklands and joining his research as an assistant: "when we weren't at sea, we walked the coastlines of wild islands, covered in giant meadows and huge colonies of albatrosses, penguins, petrels and strange waterfowl." From that day on, for Meiburg, the striated caracara became not just the subject of an ornithology thesis, but above all the keystone of a new awareness of the world. "There are islands in the Falklands that seem never to have known a human presence, where the animals aren't afraid of people because they have almost no experience of our species," he recalls. "These places are among the last small remnants of a pre-human world that is rapidly disappearing, never to return." It was like a revelation: man is nothing but a fragment of creation, yet he is the point at which nature comes to awareness of itself.

After a year of exploring the globe, Meiburg settled in Austin, Texas, but for him nothing was ever the same again: "when I came back, my ideas about music and about the world had changed." He'd been playing in bands since high school: the first ones were a sort of "metal version of Pink Floyd," and the one he was in at the time was called Kingfisher. It took another encounter for him to bring his vision to fruition: meeting Will Sheff and Okkervil River. Meiburg heard them play at a venue in Austin and was instantly struck: after the show he introduced himself to Sheff and decided to join the band as keyboardist. His contribution proved decisive in shaping the band's sound right from their first release for Jagjaguwar, "Don't Fall In Love With Everyone You See." But from the very beginning, Meiburg and Sheff also felt the need for another space for their creative expression: a more intimate, more withdrawn space, yet just as intense and personal. For the new project, Meiburg suggested the name of a seabird: Shearwater, a tribute to the world of ornithology but also an intimate link to Okkervil River, with water as a hidden trait d'union between the two.

Like little feathers on the air

It's a strange counterpoint that Jonathan Meiburg's tenor sensibility offers to Will Sheff's passionate tone: the first album under the Shearwater name, The Dissolving Room, released at the start of 2001, unfolds more or less equally between the former's evocative songwriting and the latter's narrative instinct. An acoustic tapestry made of chiaroscuro shaded with spleen and vulnerability, revealing the most intimate soul of both men's songwriting: "There is a curtain in my mouth, it opens and a song comes out / I've sung the loneliest words into your listening stones".
The echo of Okkervil River can only be felt in a few passages of songs like "Military Clothes" and "Sung In To The Streets": what prevails is a spectral, nocturnal atmosphere, in which the alternating voices follow the shifting of shadows. With Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" as the declared model, The Dissolving Room comes across more as a singer-songwriter sketch than the effort of a collective. And between the funereal violin of "Little Locket" and the romantic gait of "If You Stay Sober", the tone of affliction shared by the songs ultimately risks exhausting the entire emotional spectrum on its own.

What had begun as a mere one-off experiment starts to take on the shape of a proper band with the following album, Everybody Makes Mistakes: alongside Meiburg and Sheff, the lineup solidifies with Kim Burke on upright bass (already present on The Dissolving Room) and Thor Harris on drums, whose contributions lend new shades to the picture. Production duties go to Brian Beattie, an old acquaintance of Okkervil River, and the band signs to Misra, which releases the album in October 2002.
Sheff's approach gains a renewed lightness in the inflections of "Well, Benjamin" and "Mistakes", while Meiburg drifts dreamily over the piano of "12:09". "I want to suggest things rather than state them explicitly, to offer something that makes you feel drawn in and pushed away at the same time. I love records where the voice comes close to you and then suddenly disappears, so you can only catch fragments of it". The arrangements grow more elaborate, from the strings framing "The Ice Covered Everything" to the pump organ of "Wreck", letting Kim Burke's (now Meiburg's ex-wife) diaphanous voice take the lead in the first part of "All The Black Days" with her singing of abandonment and hope.

Sealing the close bond between Shearwater and Okkervil River, the two bands put out a split release sold at their respective shows, titled Sham Wedding / Hoax Funeral: a record with a bare-bones, improvisational spirit, recorded in Thor Harris's freezing house during the winter of 2003.
For the next proper chapter in Shearwater's discography, though, one had to wait until spring 2004, with the arrival of Winged Life. Capitalizing on the growing acclaim surrounding Okkervil River, the group aims for greater visibility: just listen to the unprecedented indie-pop stride of "A Makeover" or the restless banjo inlays of "Whipping Boy", which rank among the most striking tracks Meiburg and co. had written up to that point.
Shearwater also recruit multi-instrumentalist Howard Draper, and the sound grows sturdier, as shown by the build of opener "A Hush", which eventually opens up into sudden, sharp bursts among the notes of "Sealed". The keyboards enveloping "(I've Got A) Right To Cry" and "The Kind" don't hide their kinship with the atmospheres of "Down The River Of Golden Dreams", while Meiburg's voice grows ever more confident: a direction also confirmed by the following EP, Thieves, which collects a handful of outtakes from the album. "In many ways, it reveals the whole range of what we do", says Meiburg. Yet no one could have imagined that the rural epilogue of "Near A Garden" would be the last time Will Sheff's voice would be heard on a Shearwater record.

Something is breathing in the air

It's with Palo Santo, in 2006, that Shearwater finally spread their wings over the ocean: Meiburg takes center stage, writing and performing every track on the record by himself for the first time. And yet, the handover from Sheff's unmistakable voice goes unmourned, thanks to the band's striking growth in expressive range. The "side project" label now sounds stale: Shearwater's language no longer needs any points of reference, able as it is to grasp the essence of its own folk framework and forcefully transfigure it into an ethereal electricity. A magnetic command of language that has little to envy in Okkervil River's own black sheep.
The ghost of Christa Päffgen, better known as Nico, looms over the lyrics of Palo Santo: "it's as if she guided me through the album", Meiburg explains, "I built it drawing on various events from her life, from the way her friends saw her, from the way I imagined she must have felt". In the desolate yearning that wraps around songs like "Nobody", "Failed Queen" or "Going Is Song", it's not hard to recognize the twilight shadow of the Teutonic chanteuse.

Echoes of another dimension seem to seep into the silence of creation in the form of radio waves, interference from the spirit of Eden of Mark Hollis. The first piano notes ripple like drops on the surface of a misty pool. Meiburg's voice surfaces thin and evanescent, before suddenly emerging in all its vibrant force. Only then does the melody appear, caressed by a piano nocturne and wounded by the violin's voice. This is "La Dame Et La Licorne", a figure out of the medieval bestiary in which the unicorn becomes an allegory of purity and ambiguity.
And here comes the menacing, hammering drumbeat of "Red Sea, Black Sea", giving rise to a robotic minuet of keyboard pulses. Beneath the banjo's urgency, Meiburg's voice, more stentorian than ever, rises with a visceral force worthy of Arcade Fire. "I wanted a darker, stranger, more disturbing record", Meiburg admits. And that metallic outburst that seems to pour straight from the heart of Conor Oberst is the clearest sign of Shearwater's new direction.

Angelic and spectral at once, Palo Santo is shot through with sudden flares in which Meiburg's voice thins out and regains strength according to the emotional current. A record that is restless throughout, never allowing a moment of relief, from the emphasis of "Johnny Viola" to the distortions of "Hail, Mary", passing through the Banhart-esque lullaby of "Sing, Little Birdie". Electric scars, bursts of keyboards, glimmers of glockenspiel, moans of violin, gusts of trumpet: the electric riff of "White Waves" seems to come from a narcotized Keith Richards, while the marked piano accents of "Seventy-Four, Seventy-Five" recall the rainy seasons of John Cale.
For Meiburg, the world is divided between those who hear birdsong as noise and those who hear it as music: Palo Santo is a secret search for that music hidden in the depths of nature. Shearwater chase a lost language, capable of bringing all of creation into communion. It's a constant beating against the soul and vanishing into nothing, in time with the heartbeat of the world. “If you could ring the sky like a bell / Even such a sound would never suffice / If you could bang the world like a drum / It would only show that it’s hollow inside”.

Despite the warm reception given to Palo Santo, Shearwater felt that the album's original form didn't fully do justice to its ambitions. So, when Matador offered the band a new record deal, Meiburg and co. decided to launch their partnership with the label by releasing an "Expanded Edition" of the album: not simply a bonus-laden reissue, but a genuine reinterpretation, with the songs re-recorded from scratch to achieve a crisp, deep sound that anticipated the one found on the following album, Rook. The album comes with a second disc that, aside from a few demos and a couple of instrumental interludes, offers up the outtake "My Only Boy" and a skeletal cover of Skip James's "Special Rider Blues".

Until the world of man is paralyzed

Crows line the edge of the road, standing motionless as they scan the world as if waiting to claim it once and for all. A Hitchcockian nightmare evoked right from the cover of Shearwater's fifth album, Rook, released in 2008. "Amen, let their kingdom come tonight / Let this dream be realized".
Having announced his departure from Okkervil River in the wake of the release of "The Stand Ins", Meiburg returns with a record that stands in direct continuity with Palo Santo, even if it doesn't quite manage to match its extraordinary evocative power. The Shearwater of Rook sound more Radiohead-esque than ever: the interplay of piano and guitars on "Snow Leopard" alone would prove it, unfolding like an apocryphal "Amnesiac" possessed by the spirit of the earth, with Meiburg's voice turning now as thin as Thom Yorke's, now as vibrant as a battle cry. "Rooks" immediately establishes itself as one of the band's most memorable songs: a dramatic, charged arpeggio, a pulse of bass and drums with dark wave-like shadows, and a commanding Meiburg marking the way through insistent choruses.

According to Meiburg, while Palo Santo was like "a series of islands, a strange archipelago suspended in the sea", Rook "begins out on the open sea and dives down to explore sunken continents". The inspiration comes from a new expedition to the Falkland Islands, documented in the short film "Looking for Johnny Rook". The ambitious orchestrations of "Leviathan, Bound" and "Home Life" emerge through piano and strings with an ethereal sinuousness worthy of the least post-rock Sigur Rós. "On The Death Of The Waters" rises from the shiver of a faint whisper before crashing against a lush wall of sound, while "Lost Boys" begins floating on weightless clouds and turns into a solemn march that calls together the people of the skies.
"I wanted it so you wouldn't know where the songs were heading", Meiburg explains. "Some cut off very abruptly, others keep going on and on. I wanted there to be no sense of security about what would happen in the next song". From the faint, Bon Iver-like acoustic arpeggio of "I Was A Cloud", we move to the sturdy, cutting guitars of "Century Eyes", with a rhythm determined to carry Meiburg's commanding tone.

It's the voice of a dying nature speaking through Shearwater's music: an ark shipwrecked amid the waves, the jaws of a leviathan, a silent migration. Shrieks, reverberations and echoes of a world on the verge of breaking apart, like those that dominate the drifting instrumental "South Col". It's a warning to humankind: "You were not the first to arrive / And will not be the last to survive".
The pianistic chiaroscuro of the closing "The Hunter's Star" thus announces itself as a rarefied requiem for the world as we know it, with Meiburg weaving his poignant farewell amid the coloring of the strings: “Nemmeno un bambino / Si sveglia alla luce di un sole che diviene scarlatto / Come un pettirosso / E nemmeno una leonessa / Sale sull’ultimo, grande scafo / Sulle onde / Che chiude / Un mondo / Che non ritornerà mai più / E nemmeno un suono sfugge / Dalla notte che giunge”.

As a coda to the album, at the end of 2008 Shearwater release the The Snow Leopard EP, which — alongside the previously unreleased "North Col" and a few live tracks — strings together some significant covers, from Baby Dee's "So Bad" to the classic murder ballad "Henry Lee". Even more telling, though, is the live rendition of Talk Talk's "The Rainbow", offered as the b-side of the "Rooks" single: "a lot of musicians I've met love Talk Talk's later albums", Meiburg notes, "but I can't think of anyone who's tried to cover one of those songs. There's something incredibly complex and layered about them, but also something that's able to grow according to the laws of nature".

Running from a rising tide

The path Shearwater set out on with Palo Santo and Rook reaches its conclusion in 2010 with The Golden Archipelago: a trilogy centered on the relationship between man and the environment, on the point of no return that the human race seems to be approaching. The final chapter of the triptych grows in ambition and solemnity, opening up to a more accessible synthesis than before: but, compared to the previous installments, this time the soul seems partly obscured by its own framing.
It's the echo of an ancient song that opens The Golden Archipelago: the anthem of the inhabitants of the Bikini Islands, a fitting prologue to a concept inspired by island life as a metaphor for present times. Meiburg was struck by it after watching a documentary about the population of that Pacific atoll, forced to abandon their homes forever in 1946 to make way for warships and atomic tests. "It's a song of exile, about the impossibility of returning to the home you came from", he explains. "But the sound of the recording is joyful: it's a victory over death and destruction". Lost voices that fade into the trembling inlay of "Meridian", accompanied by the sense of fatality carried by the tolling of a distant harbor.

The sounds are dense, accentuated in the more imposing passages by the martial march of Thor Harris's drums: that's the case with "Black Eyes", with its hammering piano and restless pulse, or the single "Castaways", where the creeping melody is lashed by surging waves. Meiburg declaims his visions with vehemence, sacrificing subtlety in the name of a boldly drawn fresco: despite the solidity of the architecture, the line between theatricality and bombast grows dangerously thin.
A seething swirl of percussion accompanies the misty horizons of "Landscape At Speed", while the crescendos of strings and electricity on "God Made Me" and "Uniforms" take on baroque garb, in which it's not hard to recognize the hand of John Congleton of Paper Chase behind the production. To find the more fragile side of Shearwater, one must turn to the muted epilogue of "Missing Islands" or the hint of dance in "An Insular Life".
Meiburg's explorations at the edges of the world once again form the underlying narrative of the record: proof of this comes in a lavish illustrated book, conceived by Meiburg together with graphic designer Mark Ohe as a dossier to accompany the album, in which images of indigenous peoples and naval designs are set alongside ancient maps and travel notes.

The wild spirit of the ocean seems to loom over the songs of The Golden Archipelago: one senses it hovering over the shadows of the sinister music-box motif running through "Hidden Lakes"; one sees it surface in the lyrics of "Black Eyes" ("Look down on the rolling waves / That strike on the crumbling reef"); one hears it rumble amid the storm-tossed shards of the thunderous "Corridors".
The waters rise, threatening to swallow everything, nature reclaims ownership of the land. Meiburg doesn't see it as an apocalyptic vision: "I think the very notion of an apocalypse is an invention of human hybris — the idea that when we cease to exist, everything will cease to exist. We can't accept the idea that the world might carry on without us". Man rediscovers himself as a castaway in the world he once claimed to shape: "a new kind of refugee", as Meiburg calls it in the article published shortly before the album's release on the blog "The Huffington Post", exiled on a planet that is losing "its capacity to endure".

At the end of 2010, the band digitally released an entirely instrumental album, Shearwater Is Enron, previously sold during the tour for The Golden Archipelago. Described by Shearwater themselves as "unsettling and bizarre", the record gathers a series of improvisations, noise experiments and impressionistic fragments, including a selection from the set the band played in Albuquerque under the pseudonym "Enron".
As the crowning moment of their "Island Arc Trilogy", in January 2011 Shearwater performed Palo Santo, Rook and The Golden Archipelago in full during a torrential three-hour concert inside Austin's Central Presbyterian Church. A ten-track excerpt of the performance, The Island Arc Live, was released (again digitally), deliberately ranging across some of the trilogy's lesser-known moments. From the distortions of "Hail, Mary" to the rocky shores of "The Hunter's Star", passing through the whisper of "I Was A Cloud" and the fairy-tale touches of "Landscape At Speed", the collection reveals the band's rougher, less accommodating side.

Pull you over the line

"Man, with all his noble qualities, still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin", warned Charles Darwin. A primordial mark that reasserts its primacy through the evolutionary chain. Shearwater set off again from the animal essence that runs through our blood, to open a new chapter of their adventure in 2012. Having explored the fragile balances of nature across their "Island Arc Trilogy", Jonathan Meiburg and co. turn their gaze to that strange and terrible creature called man. And to do so, they choose to delve into his most ancestral instincts, in search of pure and simple animal joy.
The baroque ambitions of The Golden Archipelago thus give way, on Animal Joy, to a more muscular and direct sound, a fitting seal on the move to a rock-leaning, high-visibility label like Sub Pop. The trajectory, paradoxically, doesn't look too far removed from that of old fellow travelers Okkervil River and their latest "I Am Very Far": because here too, the pounce is missing its truest claws.

"I wanted this record to have a body, not just a brain", explains Meiburg. "I felt like I'd reached the limit of a certain approach and wanted to try something different. I didn't want a big, grand orchestral atmosphere, but something dusty and earthbound". The contours grow sharper, the voice tends to flatten into an emphatic register, and the linear geometry of the riffs, from "Breaking The Yearlings" to "Immaculate", seems to chase the alt-rock canon of The National. It's no coincidence that at the mixing desk is Peter Katis, producer of "Boxer" and a virtually permanent collaborator of Matt Berninger's band.
The record's breath, though, struggles to go beyond the surface. Is it the fault of the desire to recapture the pulse of instinct? Meiburg doesn't worry about that and goes hunting for the less domesticated side of the soul on "Animal Life": “Searching at the light’s perimeter/ The half-remembered wild interior / Of an animal life”.
"Animals are exactly where they are, whatever they happen to be doing at that moment", reflects the Shearwater frontman. "The naturalness of their presence is something I love to contemplate". Living fully immersed in the instant. Even when it means giving up certainties and setting off on a journey in the footsteps of the wild horizons of "Into The Wild": “You could run in the blood of the sun’s hard rays/ You could drive the mountains down into the bay/ Or go back to the east where it’s all so civilized/ Where I was born to life”. Meiburg has no doubts about which path to take: "I am leaving the life", he proclaims on the final surge of "You As You Were". Sometimes, though, that's the easier road. And it isn't necessarily the one that leads furthest.

At the end of 2013, Shearwater released a covers collection built on an unusual premise, titled Fellow Travelers, entirely devoted to reinterpreting songs by artists who had shared the stage with the band. "Reimagining and renewing songs by the groups we'd toured with was like flipping through a notebook, it brought back all the highs and lows of a decade of shows", Meiburg recalls. For this reason, Shearwater decided to directly involve their fellow travelers in the project, asking each of them to take part in reinterpreting someone else's song.
Out of this evocative idea of cross-artist sharing comes a record that's perhaps less daring than one might have imagined, but still solid and coherent in its overall design. Shearwater carry on in the vein of Animal Joy for the album's most immediate tracks: a "Natural One" by Folk Implosion that hews a touch too closely to the original, and a sturdy "I Luv The Valley OH!" by Jamie Stewart's Xiu Xiu (with whom Meiburg had already launched the side project Blue Water White Death in the past). The most surprising transformation, though, is that of "Hurts Like Heaven" by Coldplay, which sheds the pop trappings of "Mylo Xyloto" to rest on a piano bearing the Shearwater stamp more than ever. Fellow Travelers remains, all told, a project aimed mainly at fans, with the only original composition being the acoustic sketch "A Wake For The Minotaur", featuring the whisper of Sharon Van Etten (once the band's tour manager) alongside Meiburg's voice.

Shearwater's arc continued in 2016 with Jet Plane And Oxbow, in which a sound steeped in wave inflections accompanies the most political songs in Meiburg and co.'s catalogue. Having lost drummer Thor Harris amid a lineup overhaul, Shearwater give voice to the sense of frustration and resentment of the dawning Trump era: "I wanted to make a protest record that didn't feel trite or preachy", Meiburg notes. "The more the songs sounded grand or triumphant, the more conflicted the lyrics became. It reminds me of the letter you write to end a relationship – the kind of letter that's furious and tender at the same time, because it's written with love".
As on Animal Joy, the production bears the emphatic stamp of Danny Reisch, though the collaboration with Brian Reitzell (composer of scores for several Sofia Coppola films) lends the songs a cinematic perspective. Between the neon flicker of the synths ("Prime", "Quiet Americans") and the krautrock-tinged rhythms ("Filaments", "Radio Silence"), a new pop inclination pushes its way forward, most evident in the melodic sensibility of tracks like "Backchannels". But as the ambitions grow, the band's most original traits seem to end up diluted.
During the Jet Plane And Oxbow tour, Shearwater tackled a full live performance of David Bowie's Berlin trilogy: from the New York shows of 2018, the band drew a self-released triple live album as a record of the event, Shearwater Plays Bowie's Berlin Trilogy Live.

Back in the wilderness and inside of the sanctum

Dripping Springs, Texas. A camper van outside town. Inside the camper, a makeshift desk. On the desk, a sheet of paper with a line jotted down as a reminder. They're verses from a poem by T.S. Eliot: "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope/ For hope would be hope for the wrong thing". That's where Jonathan Meiburg began weaving the fabric of Shearwater again: staring at those words, meditating on that waiting. And that's where The Great Awakening began to take shape.
"I didn't want to make music without hope", Meiburg confesses. And of hope, on the preceding Jet Plane And Oxbow, there was practically no trace.
After six years of silence, then, the awakening comes to pass. An awakening in which the sense of waiting is never synonymous with passivity, but with the stance of someone who wants to listen: to the voices of others, to the whisper of the world. On The Great Awakening, then, Shearwater's music becomes more ethereal and atmospheric than ever. Keyboards, strings and circular rhythms, over which Meiburg's voice rises, bodiless, as it did back in the "Island Arc Trilogy" days. And then the echoes of the biosphere, the ancient language of the spirits of the earth: the gurgle of water that opens "Milkweed", the howler monkeys that make their appearance on "Xenarthran" ("the sound of someone tearing the fabric of space and time"), the song of toucans soaring over the notes of "Aqaba". On "There Goes The Sun" you can even hear the breath of an old refrigerator looped endlessly, like the lament of matter in ruin.
"The world we live in is a place where our lives are only part of the stories unfolding", Meiburg reflects. As in the album's cover image, the remains of the Anthropocene give way to the silent assembly of nature, gathered in a circle around a kind of cosmic egg. The Great Awakening thus sounds like the soundtrack to a dimension made of liminal spaces, places where the human presence seems to have suddenly dissolved.

Shearwater's metamorphosis, their return to essentials after the muscularity of Animal Joy and Jet Plane And Oxbow, runs deep. It stems first of all from the experience of Loma, the side project Meiburg undertook alongside Emily Cross and Dan Duszynski (a couple in life as well as in art, under the banner of Cross Record): it's no coincidence that Duszynski now appears as a full-fledged member of Shearwater, as well as the album's producer. Then there are the inevitable marks of pandemic isolation: a period during which Meiburg devoted himself to a series of instrumental meditations, collected across the eight chapters of Quarantine Music. As if that weren't enough, Meiburg also published his first book ("A Most Remarkable Creature"), devoted to the caracara, the bird of prey that has always been at the center of his studies on the relationship between ecosystems and man. During the long gestation of The Great Awakening (released in 2022 with the support of crowdfunding, after the end of the relationship with Sub Pop), all of these influences settled into a layered, ambient sound

Sitting outside his camper, amid the Texas wilderness, Meiburg pauses to watch the armadillos crossing the fields at sunset. "They've walked thousands of miles on their tiny legs, long noses to the ground, trudging through alien landscapes full of unknown dangers". "Xenarthran" is inspired precisely by them, the mammals of the order Xenarthra. Animals capable of making their way through a world that is terrible and wonderful at once. There it is, hope. Even on the edge of the abyss, refusing to give in to resignation. The epilogue of The Great Awakening, then, can only be an invitation to a new beginning: "Start now", proclaims the pulse of "Wind Is Love". "Carrying the hopes of a former life/ That never fully died".

"If there's one thing I'd like to do in my life", Meiburg announces while presenting the follow-up to The Great Awakening in the summer of 2026, "it's to make the world in my mind reflect the real world as closely as possible". The New World, the new album from the American band, is about exactly this: the tension between our inner self and what surrounds us. Like the coasts of the New World seen for the first time by men of the Old, like our venturing into the interregnum of a dark future, while the world we knew is dying. The New World is the logbook of this crossing, and immediately reveals itself as one of the most precious chapters in Shearwater's entire discography.

"Nothing is ordinary", announces "Daydream Unbeliever" over the march of the piano. Wonder and fear, the two opposite poles of its gaze. There's a sense of threat in the tolling of the drums, in the swell of the strings. The spirit of "Palo Santo" and "Rook" vibrates again with a deeper equilibrium: the fruit of maturity, certainly, but also of a few decisive collaborations (from Shahzad Ismaily to Leo Abrahams, in whose recording studios the album's gestation took place). The coordinates remain the familiar ones: from the most ethereal Talk Talk ("More And More", with its layering and its sax flourishes) to late-period Radiohead ("A Mink In The Dusk", nervy rhythm and choral openings). But if The Great Awakening was the record of rebirth, The New World is the record of sublimation, in which everything seems to rediscover its own essence.

Tasmanian crows, Berlin blackbirds, coyotes caught off guard on the hills of Los Angeles: Meiburg's field recordings are the language of reality telling its own story. They weave through the sinuous flow of "Slugs In The Marigolds" and the climax of "The Only Sound I'm Afraid Of", which crashes against a cliff face of guitars. Along the way, Shearwater (now a stable trio, with Dan Duszynski and Emily Lee alongside Meiburg) meet unexpected fellow travelers, like the group of Malian musicians who appear on "Even Song". The most surprising presence of all, though, is Laurie Anderson, entrusted with the spoken word on the closing "You And Your Dog": struck by reading Meiburg's first book, "A Most Remarkable Creature" (a second one, devoted to Antarctica, is now on the way), she agreed to lend her voice to a tale that slowly unspools around the repetition of a simple piano phrase.   Through their journey, Shearwater have earned an unmistakable style all their own, gradually shaking off the legacy of Okkervil River. Like something out of a Jules Verne fantasy, they keep venturing in search of their own personal mysterious island: the place where man and nature might hope to find harmony again. Jonathan Meiburg's dream is to one day land on that shore, inviting its inhabitants to gather around his music. One room would be enough to hold them all, and it would be like holding the ocean inside a shell.

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