Shearwater is set to play Carling Academy Oxford Sunday 14th September, 2008. Other acts include Little Fish and Morrison Steam Fayre.

Described as a gem in America’s underground, Shearwater come to Oxford following the release of their latest album ‘Rook’. The band has just completed supporting Coldplay in the States. They’re a spin off of Okkervil River (who played Truck Festival this year) and they sound like a mix between a lot of things, with a Radiohead feel.

Watch “Palo Santo” video:

About Shearwater

Hailed as “almost impossibly majestic and beautiful” (NPR “album of the year”), Shearwater’s Palo Santo (2007, Matador), a suite of ethereal but oddly disquieting art-rock songs loosely centered around the life and death of singer Christa Paffgen (aka Nico), marked the Texan quartet’s debut on the national stage. Several publications, including The New York Times, named it one of the year’s best, and the band’s singular combination of sonic abandon and restraint, spun around the soaring, otherworldly voice of part-time ornithologist Jonathan Meiburg, drew comparisons to late-period Talk Talk and both the lovely and anxious moments of Eno’s early solo work.

This year’s much-anticipated ‘Rook’ takes the band into realms both richer and stranger. Though a similarly haunted, elegaic mood – punctuated by flashes of dread and menace – pervades the album, ‘Rook’ is its own animal, at once more accessible (the near-title track, “Rooks”, anchored by Thor Harris’ thunderous kick drum, a booming organ, and a stately trumpet line, could almost be mistaken for radio-friendly) and more accomplished than its predecessor, with a depth and grandeur that seem improbably packed into the album’s tidy 35 minutes. Squalls of feedback have largely given way to sudden gusts of strings and woodwinds, though the band’s fondness for unusual instrumentation remains intact – harp, hammer dulcimer, and a curiously carved metal box all take featured roles.

Each song on Rook is a mini-epic, from the in-medias-res opening of “On the Death of the Waters” to the pounding (but drumless) urgency of “Leviathan, Bound”, the abrupt rock of “Century Eyes”, the crystalline depths and heights of “I Was a Cloud” and “The Snow Leopard”, and the final, elegant flourish of “The Hunter’s Star”.

‘Rook’ is unlike any other album you’ll hear this year – or any year. It has the vividness and ineffability of a waking dream, the strange beauty and internal logic of a fairy tale, and above all, evokes a vanishing world that may or may not be our own.

Carling Academy Oxford (Oxford Zodiac)
Sunday 14th September, 2008 7:30pm
£11
www.hitthetheatre.co.uk/shearwater
or to book on the phone 0207 1939050
or at the venue

For more information, go to:

Carling Academy Oxford

Shearwater Official Website
Shearwater MySpace

Little Fish

Morrison Steam Fayre Official Website
Morrison Steam Fayre MySpace