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.
Aves 
Passeriformes
Corvidae
Corvus
Shearwater
Rook(Matador)
1/2