Album Of The Week: Shearwater Fellow Travelers

There are plenty of good reasons to listen to Shearwater: There's the band's admirably expansive ambitions, almost prog-level for an indie rock band. (They made their mark by releasing an actual honest-to-god trilogy of albums.) There's the panache with which they pull up dramatic, dynamic flare-ups, their big choruses erupting out of placid stillness. There's their light touch with orchestral arrangements. There's Thor Harris, so good at pounding the shit out of drums and looking like a thawed-out caveman that Michael Gira poached him for the reactivated Swans. There's their always-immaculate production. But there's only one great reason to listen to Shearwater, and that's Jonathan Meiburg's voice. Meiburg's voice is, quite simply, a wonder: An operatic tenor that soars and swoops and keens without Meiburg ever cutting corners on his precise, clipped, almost-British locution. It's a voice engineered to echo off of European canyon walls, and Shearwater's songs seem built completely around it, arranged to stay out of its way. The all-covers album is the sort of thing that practically broadcasts its own inessential status, to allow bands a space to scream about their own good taste, and I'm tempted to make Spaghetti Incident? jokes every time I hear about another one coming out. With Shearwater, though, it makes sense. Who wouldn't want to hear that voice sing a whole mess of other people's songs?