Kiss Each Other Clean is exactly the kind of album you want to hear from a seasoned artist like Iron & Wine. It’s an exploration of new territory that doesn’t fall victim to Sufjan Stevens Syndrome — that is, experimenting to the point of being unrecognizable.
Sam Beam’s fourth full-length seamlessly blends funk, soul (yeah, the rumors are true: you are hearing saxophones on an Iron & Wine album) and the rootsy folk the band is known for. Ultimately, Kiss Each Other Clean feels right at home in Iron & Wine’s discography without coming off as stagnant or derivative.
The standout track is, without a doubt, opener “Walking Far From Home.” It starts off muddy, until the entrance of a quiet, elegantly understated piano chord clears the distortion like the flick of a light switch illuminating a darkened room.
Beam’s evocative lyrics cut like shards of glass through the haze of background vocals, fragile near-howls of “ooh” and “ahh”: “Saw a white dog chase its tail/And a pair of hearts carved into a stone/I saw kindness and an angel/Crying, ‘Take me back home, take me back home.'” The instrumentation grows between stanzas: spare piano to start, joined by skeletal percussion, then full-bodied bass, all culminating in a return to distortion; a pressing, insectile buzz.
The song, like the album, is a meditative journey, tinged with nostalgia and at times a sense of desperation or a sense of joy.
Another exceptional track, though perhaps not as single-worthy as “Walking Far From Home,” is the album closer, “Your Fake Name Is Good Enough for Me.” It starts with a dark but almost jaunty intensity, reminiscent of early Doors, and then shifts into a moody mantra of, “We will become, become, become.”
And what will we become? To paraphrase just a few examples: the rising sun, the damage done, the river sway and the love we made; the blood and bone, an ice cream cone, the way and the wall and a disco ball.
You have to admit, Beam has a flair for combining the mundane and the melodramatic. The end result feels utterly authentic; a pristine and painfully articulate picture of the human experience.
