Kiss Each Other Clean

Sam Beams and his transfiguration tricks

Always seeking something, thinking of something and singing something, Sam Beam has taught us to expect from him something unprecedented. Although he never seems to stop his experiments, lyrical and composing tricks, he is the musician who has his particular style beyond anyone’s doubt. Releasing his albums under the name of Iron & Wine, Sam has worked out a fancy manner that you have to recognize instantly. Whatever Sam plays, you have no chance of taking his voice or acoustic guitar for someone else’s. In 2011, another CD was released under the mark of Iron & Wine. Called Kiss Each Other Clean, it looks like a great surprise even for those who wait nothing but surprises from Sam Beam. The musician has put so many questions around this album and even on its cover, whose secret meaning may be fully known only to him. Beam is not going to give straight answers to all of these questions, offering a many-faceted music that still has some associations with the folk-traditions, yet transformed under the influence of great many other trends.

Still farther from the initial style

Kiss Each Other Clean is Sam Beam’s journey even farther to the music lands he has not researched well yet, but the lands so fascinating to him. Admirers of the old Iron & Wine may find this metamorphosis too imposed, unnatural and illogical for this author’s evolution. What remains intact is Beam’s poetic method. He is still loyal to images only he can understand. In the first track, Walking Far From Home, he puts together the pictures of beauty with the pictures of ugliness. Still, Sam relies not only on his vocal, but on the support of a whole choir, which is not traditional of him yet. However a much bigger surprise comes with the second song, Me And Lazarus, that offers some unpolished funk with saxophone and dance rhythms not confident enough to sound out loud. To prevent the listener from shock, Sam quickly brings us back to the more comfortable area. Tree By The River is full of deep speculation and nostalgia, which makes it so much like folk and Iron & Wine’s first songs. Nevertheless, this is not an end to toying with jazz and funk. By the end of the record, saxophone gains much more courage, while bass grows intense and impulsive. These are the instruments that reveal the whole hot temper of the songs placed in the album’s final part, Big Burned Hand, and Your Fake Name Is Good Enough For Me.

Kiss Each Other Clean surprises and charms

Kiss Each Other Clean is not based on one particular mood or atmosphere which would embrace the whole track-listing. Just like the music of these songs that may take any forms, Beam feels free to sing of anything and in any manner. He chooses dark and surrealistic figures for Monkeys Uptown, and Rabbit Will Run, as if making the audience ready for anything on this album. The variety of the musical and lyrical material may be a great entertainment to some people, and a great confusion for other. However, Kiss Each Other Clean does not produce an impression of a compilation of songs from different albums, which makes it a very special record. Unexpected changes of topics, unforeseeable ideas make this CD remind us of a story about Alice in the Wonderland. The journey starts immediately and ends all of a sudden, and we do not want to let go Sam Beam’s hand and stay in total loneliness of our own. Leaving the execution without comments, because Iron & Wine are always associated with top execution, we give all of our praise to this charismatic musician for this charming musical present.