Shearwater’s Jet Plane And Oxbow is an album that looks backward—to the recording technologies and sounds of the early ’80s—in order to interrogate the present and to contemplate the future. Shearwater’s moody, thoughtful style, built around Jonathan Meiburg’s dramatic, beautiful voice, turned toward rock with 2012’s Animal Joy, which now sounds like a stopover in the flight path toward Jet Plane. Meiburg used period-specific instruments; his guitar playing alludes to Adrian Belew’s work with David Bowie and Robert Fripp’s with Peter Gabriel; he integrates the stark sounds of Joy Division and early New Order. But the goal wasn’t nostalgia. Jet Plane doesn’t sound retro, nor does it sound like an homage. The allusions are there to create a sonic parallel to our time. Meiburg will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Shearwater feature.
Meiburg: After a few weeks or months on a rock tour, you get enough decibels crammed into your skull to last you a while—sometimes I wear earplugs all day—and the thought of a monastic life can start to sound kind of appealing, at least for a little while. I picked up this book more or less at random, and partly because it was so slim, but Patrick Leigh Fermor pulled me right in to his accounts of life in three different monasteries in Europe, capped with a visit to the spooky, abandoned monks’ cells of Cappadocia, honeycombed out of wind-blasted cliffs.
I should admit I’m a sucker for this kind of writer. Fermor’s as genial as he is erudite—he sits down next to you and starts talking in a casual, conspiratorial way, and you can almost see the smoke curling away from the end of his cigarette. (Imagine Ralph Fiennes at his most tony, rakish and charming, and you sort of get the idea.) You can get a sort of brainy contact high from him—or you might want to throw the book across the room. But to me, even when Fermor burrows into esoteric details of history, theology and art, he almost never forgets that they’re only really useful as a way to see living people more clearly.
In A Time to Keep Silence, PLF is at his most restrained (it’s a book about monks, for chrissakes), but if you like it, re-up for his epic trilogy about his walk from Holland to Istanbul in 1934, before Europe had its clock cleaned by war: A Time Of Gifts, Between The Woods And The Water and The Broken Road. They’re non-fiction, but they feel more like the sequel to The Lord Of The Rings than any fantasy novel, full to bursting with life, adventure and exotic worlds that are now long gone.
Video after the jump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_8rz_C7evs
