When Sam Beam made the last Iron & Wine album, 2024’s Light Verse, he chose to name it after a form of poetry centered on levity, amusement, and joy. But that title is a misnomer, a bait-and-switch; the record’s dark subject matter often belies its buoyant instrumentals. “All in Good Time,” a duet with Fiona Apple, makes for a pointed example, with a bridge that climaxes in both vocalists singing “something wants to eat us all alive.”
Hen’s Teeth, its self-coined “sibling album” and recorded in the same sessions with the same backing band at Laurel Canyon’s Waystation, is the darker side of the moon. Here, Beam explores the gravitational properties of love and how it can sometimes pull us toward less-than-welcoming places. Whereas the songs on Light Verse mask their gloomy themes with gleeful instrumentation, Hen’s Teeth is the inverse of that. This is an album that finds solace in sorrow; the gratification that can arise from devotion to the point of self-erasure; and watching something bigger than yourself flourish from an act of giving.
Beam gets the album’s ethos across from its lead single alone. “I don’t want to be saved / How I wish you felt the same / When I find myself swimming in your ocean,” he sings near the end of “In Your Ocean.” Or take the penultimate “Dates and Dead People,” in which its protagonist’s toast to a life of love is “lighter than light,” an “empty cloud that gave all it could bear.” The way Beam sings it, feeling empty sounds sublimely fulfilling. During early highlight “Paper and Stone,” he repurposes a classic game of chance to meditate on an uneven partnership, how one half inevitably subsumes the other: “Say who we are / paper and stone / Say who we are / stone and scissors.” It’s a clever metaphor that tangentially summons one of Amy Winehouse’s most famous aphorisms.
Given that Light Verse was the first proper Iron & Wine album since 2017’s Beast Epic, the short release window between Hen’s Teeth and its predecessor seems like yet another tethering device. But its inverse themes make for something deeper and more convincing. It isn’t subversive, per se, as it draws from the same indie-folk stylings and finger-picked guitars as its direct sibling (and its many cousins in other Iron & Wine albums), yet that doesn’t dull its impact so much as call attention to its more novel embellishments. Paul Jacob Cartwright’s trilling violin makes for a warm presence on “Singing Saw.” Mandola, zither, and tenor guitar, courtesy of Cartwright and David Garza, add textural flair and tonal depth throughout. I’m With Her’s guest harmonies on “Robin’s Egg” and “Wait Up” blend seamlessly with the songs’ filigreed arrangements.
Even on its own merits and severed from its sibling, Hen’s Teeth is a reminder of Sam Beam’s stirring songwriting prowess and how he has always been capable of wringing new sentiments and ideas out of his tried-and-true indie-folk milieu. As one of the most consistently compelling musicians of his era, it’s a delight to hear him continue on a streak that’s decidedly yet to meet its end. Across these ten songs, Beam explores romance’s well-documented dichotomy of pleasure and pain, but the act of listening to the music itself is pure pleasure. [Sub Pop]
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.
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