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: This film’s older brother Koyaanisqatsi is the one that usually gets the attention. Kids at my college used to get super-stoned and go to a yearly screening of it, which I don’t necessarily recommend unless 70mm close-up slo-mo of the mindless, world-eating machinery of industrial civilization in the USA, circa 1980, set to doomy Philip Glass organ drones and bass-heavy choirs, sounds groovy to you.
Powaqqatsi is just as overwhelming (and scary), but it has a beauty that Koyaanisqatsi lacks, and takes on a much larger subject—pretty much the entire “developing world” as it’s inaccurately called, circa 1986. And the score! Glass is the composer again, but he seems unusually energized by textures and instruments he’d never used before, like the exuberant Brazilian percussion and singers of opener “Serra Pelada” At its best, it sounds like a world music that’s actually worthy of the name.
Video after the jump.
