Meiburg and Co. have been carefully and consistently releasing albums for years which serve to highlight what seems to be missing from today’s crop of emotional indie rockers. In this climate of instant musical gratification and mp3 saturation, Shearwater are harking back to the time in music when the album as a whole said more than the songs themselves. And by saying this, I am by no means selling short the merits of The Golden Archipelago, only making a point about the way that Shearwater have approached the basic concept of the album. The songs, like on a dream mixtape, are placed in the perfect order, with one song following the natural progression of the album into the next track. Besides the obvious imagery of a physical body of water that permeates the entire outing, Meiburg also uses this as a way to talk about the interconnectivity between ourselves, and between others, our own personal islands. The songs progress as Shearwater dictates, through the comfortable progressions of loud to soft and back again, but these commonly used modes are not used lazily but in a precise manner, allowing us to see the push and pull between a world that Meiburg feels should exist and the reality in which he finds himself.
Tracklisting:
01. Meridian
02. Black Eyes
03. Landscape at Speed
04. Hidden Lakes
05. Corridors
06. God Made Me
07. Runners of the Sun
08. Castaways (listen to the mp3 below)
09. An Insular Life
10. Uniforms
11. Missing Islands
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