Shearwater crafts a sound ideal for hours of
drifting and immersion—Jonathan Meiburg's delicate specter of a voice,
like the band as a whole, sounds ready to slip into some new shape at any
moment. If Sun Kil Moon and The Black Angels can get away with 10-minute songs,
so could Shearwater, and they'd probably make better use of that time.
The hell of it is that Rook navigates its ghoulish
mist with brevity and sparseness, from the acoustic guitar-and-piano arpeggios
of "I Was A Cloud" to the orchestral creaks of "Lost Boys." Rook never uses any one
element too rigidly: The piano and guitar often seem to hold the structure
down, but they often wander, and the drums are alternately spare and
straightforward. The droning instrumental "South Col" and the piano doodles
that end "On The Death Of The Waters" seem unnecessary, but don't trip things
up, either. Most of these 10 songs run under four minutes, but even the
seven-minute "Home Life" dissolves from one phase to the next at a deceptively
listener-friendly pace.
This ambient, near-formless quality is really a
means for sneaking humbly into the foreground. Meiburg's voice focuses each
track on quietly bold melodies, strung through with excitement, wonder, and
joy. They all bleed together on "The Hunter's Star," the perfect conclusion to Rook's balance of immediacy
and elusive bliss.