2011 marks Iron and Wine's first studio offering since 2007's lauded The Shepherd's Dog, and folk-royalty Sam Beam has apparently spent the last four years slow-cooking his sound: Kiss Each Other Clean is the poppiest he's ever been. It's also the best.
Doing away with lo-fi, twangy bluegrass ballads about knotted wood and whatnot, KOEC is ursurped by a buffet of charming, sentimental pop (circa 1977) with more layers than puff pastry.
Steeped in the unexpected, it's brimming with surprise cameos of strutworthy bass, glockenspiel, sweeping horns, doo-wop, and what sounds suspiciously like those lollipop flutes you used to get at the milkbar. The result is incongruous as a whole (gorgeous opener 'Walking from home' pays delirious due deference to Brian Wilson, while the following 'Me and Lazarus' sounds like 'Waterfalls' if TLC had beards) but Beam's underwater croon melds everything together into a sublime 48-minute technicolour escape. It's crazy, but it's too lovely to care.
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