Pitchfork

There's an intimacy to Sam Beam's voice that makes it shamefully easy to imagine him curled up in the corner of your futon, slurping tea from a chipped mug, absent-mindedly fiddling with an old acoustic guitar and scribbling words into a coverless notebook. He is always chewing on a pencil, and when he talks, his words come slow.

Shake it off. While the idea of Sam Beam tugging at your afghan might seem perfectly inviting, it's actually just dangerous: the traditions and artists of the American south have long been fetishized and vilified with equal fervor, and, perhaps appropriately, both the region and its inhabitants are starting to assume near-cartoonish proportions in print and onscreen. Unsurprisingly, Iron and Wine's grubby campfire hymns are subject to the very same kind of blind, moonlight-heavy romanticizing-- which might make swallowing a new, gently-buffed Iron and Wine album doubly difficult. Picture crisp, fuzz-free vocals and gently brushed snares shooting like darts, incisive and stinging, each chiseled tip dipped in hot studio poison: This is not the Iron and Wine of yesteryear.

When The Creek Drank the Cradle puttered quietly out of Sub Pop's warehouse in 2002, it was stupidly easy to be tugged into the quasi-escapist, heavily idealized portrait of Beam-as-basement-troubadour-- a bearded, southern, "down home" father of two with a cardboard box full of shitty equipment and an unassuming shoulder shrug. The whimsical inadvertence of Beam's debut-- and the vague sense that the composition and realization of Creek were just as profound and accidental as the record's eventual distribution-- lent Beam's work a dangerous edge of serendipity. Listening to The Creek Drank the Cradle felt like accidentally digging up a diamond, clutching it briefly in a soil-streaked palm, and then shoving it deep into your front pocket, eyes shooting around suspiciously. Nobody who found it ever wanted to give it up.

Last year's The Sea and the Rhythm EP, which featured five previously unreleased Creek tracks, saw Iron and Wine maintaining his four-track sigh, bringing his hissing home-studio work to a glorious, satisfying end. For Our Endless Numbered Days, Beam darted out of his basement and into Chicago's Engine Studios, and the resulting record sees Beam taking a satisfying break from air-conditioner-as-rhythm-section: Producer Brian Deck (Califone, Fruit Bats, Holopaw) folds in twittering percussive bits, while sister Sarah Beam coos sweet harmonies and bandmates Jonathan Bradley, EJ Holowicki, Jeff McGriff, and Patrick McKinney provide ample backing. Our Endless Numbered Days is cleaner, more diverse, and generally sparser than its predecessor, and, given the apparent limits of Beam's former setup, it's also an astoundingly progressive record: Beam has successfully transgressed his cultural pigeonhole without sacrificing any of his dusty allure.

Opener "On Your Wings" mixes Beam's pert guitar picks with rolling slide; scraps of percussion gradually fold in, vocals fall off, and the band somersaults into a comparably raucous mini-jam. In "Naked as We Came", Beam nods to the album's enigmatic title, softly lamenting mortality ("One of us will die inside these arms/ Eyes wide open, naked as we came/ One of us will spread our ashes around the yard") over Creek-ish acoustic strums, while Sarah whispers along, her barely audible murmurs more haunting for their delicacy. "Each Coming Night" is instantly moving, perfectly hinged on a bubblegum melody, while "Sodom, South Georgia" nails gothic disquiet both on and off the page ("All dead white boys say, 'God is good'/ White tongues hang out, 'God is good'").

Studio tweaking aside, there's another, more subtle tonal flip here: Beam's lyrics, once dribbling over with issues of faith and fidelity, are distinctly more guarded, a switch which seems inextricably linked to the relative (and unexpected) ubiquity of his debut. Creek was full of gently whispered secrets, each tiny, grinning confession or perverse admission only adding to the record's furtive charms. A sizable audience might not have been part of Beam's songwriting equation before, but it is now-- and while Our Endless Numbered Days' lacquered cuts might seem slightly more transparent at first, their lyrics are infinitely more obscured, heavy with their own predestined publicity. Now, Beam juggles bits of dialogue (over half of these tracks feature extra speakers; "Naked as We Came" and "Each Coming Night" both focus almost exclusively on clips of conversation), painstakingly easing himself out of the narrator's chair, and voicing what would otherwise be some wincingly maudlin bits (see "I want your flowers like babies want God's love").

Obviously, none of this makes Beam any less of a poet; if anything, Beam's freshly veiled lyrics have simply pushed Iron and Wine toward more subversive levels of storytelling. The song-as-poem critical course has been applied to Beam before, but the accuracy of the analogy never wanes: Beam and Deck toy with syntax and meter, using shaky bits of percussion, volume shifts, and tempo changes to mimic the twitchy movement of the best epic poetry. In the past, Beam's lyrics have proved his linguistic prowess, but it's the eerie lyricism of the instrumentation that ultimately pushes Our Endless Numbered Days deep into the canon of American verse.

Slavic poet Charles Simic talks about poetry as "a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph." And it's in this sense that Beam is, above all else, a poet: His tabletops are littered with gritty little snapshots of life well-lived, strewn with tender acoustic strums, pictures of the ocean, shaken maracas, mothers, fathers, arms. It's a beautiful display.