Iron & Wine

Something has changed in the world of Sam Beam, the bearded Floridian who goes by the moniker Iron & Wine: Where once was a hushed grandeur, a well-oiled beast has let out a hollow howl.

Beam’s previous solo LPs (2002’s “The Creek Drank the Cradle” and 2004’s “Our Endless Numbered Days”) glowed with disarming, whispered proximity. While these full-lengths and a few interspersed EPs have found his homespun aesthetic—all tape hum and endearing errors—buried beneath ever-thickening layers of production, his new release, “The Shepherd’s Dog,” stands like a Hollywood blockbuster beside the backstage vaudeville of the catalogue that precedes it.

Gone are the living-room fuzz and the steady solitude of a lone acoustic guitar. Gone, too, is the image of a storyteller, suspender-bound, murmuring myths on a sun-drenched porch.

In some ways, to bemoan the increased polish of Iron & Wine is to lament the inevitable, as with expanding audiences comes a pull into the wiry world of the studio. Still, selfish as it sounds, there was a soft magic to the lo-fi ambiance of his earliest records, buried now below vocal effects and extended (by Beam standards) “jam” sessions.

While this diversification of instrumentation isn’t all bad, it’s a bit unsettling at first. Songs like “White Tooth Man” and the quasi-title track, “Wolves (Song of the Shepherd’s Dog),” sound like remastered rarities from mid-period Phish records. Much of the rest of the album just feels busy, like a first-time user tinkering with Garage Band, layering effects until the subtlety of the song’s skeleton is lost.

What work best on the album are, as usual, the moments that capture bare-bones Beam. “Lovesong of the Buzzard” wisps along on an upbeat percussion line, with effects reminiscent of “Highway 61 Revisited” rising in and out of its shadows. “Resurrection Fern” is gorgeous, glimmering like a moonlit reflection of older song “The Trapeze Swinger,” and the album closer, “Flightless Bird, American Mouth,” is the closest Beam comes to his earliest work.

Even some of the less spare pieces manage to work. “Boy With a Coin,” the album’s first single, lopes along to hand-claps and layered vocals, and something even fresher stands out on “The Devil Never Sleeps,” which blends a radio-ready chorus with honky-tonk piano riffs.

Still, the album sags in places, too noticeably to be rescued by occasional brilliance. Much of it sounds uninspired, despite the fact that this is material Beam has supposedly been sitting on for some time. While 2004’s “Our Endless Numbered Days” had only one real disappointment (the repetitive “Teeth in the Grass”), this album seems to have a few such teeth.

It may seem silly to judge an album based on rigid, preconceived notions of what it should have been, but in a sense these are the criteria with which we judge all our favorite artists. To return to his roots, to basement recordings and a reliance on his haunting lyrics: that’s what we expect from Iron & Wine. As for complexity and diversity of production—well, there’s always the new Animal Collective for that.