There are lots of reasons to call this record Rook. Most obviously, Shearwater songwriter Jon Meiburg has a serious bird jones (check the band name). Secondly, the guy has finally bid an official farewell to his gig in Okkervil River, whose Will Sheff used to cosongwrite for Shearwater. He's flown that coop, yep.

But maybe Meiburg should've picked a more aquatic name, as the band's fifth LP finds them setting sail from their Southern-gothic folk-rock approach and lapping at European shores with the gentle ebbs of a tide. If the opening song's any indication, running aground wasn't so quaint: "As the splinter flies apart, to your bow, to the biggest wave/but your angel's on holiday/and that wave rises slowly and breaks," Meiburg weeps in his striking falsetto, before the song imitates the crash, harp and horns and strings and feedback and wooden bits of ship all asunder.

After that, the record flows like water over rocks, moonlight gleaming on the surface (like the sound of tinkling xylophone above a cushion of cellos in "Leviathan, Bound"), without abrupt starts or stops. It's Shearwater's first full departure from folk songwriting roots—even memorable rockers like "Rooks" and "The Snow Leopard" avoid choruses and central repetition, allowing the band's most lush instrumentation yet to warble on, building momentum like a classical arrangement. Meiburg's inimitable mix of falsetto and bravado stands aside more often than usual—he's both bleeding heart and patient conductor on album centerpiece "Home Life." It plays like a Parisian funeral waltz à la Beirut or DeVotchKa, but darker; Meiburg laments the theft of a beloved's innocence—"Slashing away at those forest walls with their bitter knives/sparks loom in their eyes/and they never look tired/and they never look tired"—then flutes and violins take turns crying their eyes out until they're just another drip in Rook's gorgeous, sad stream.

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