Shearwater Let It All Come Out Tonight

Virginia Woolf once wrote, “Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day,” and though it wasn’t quite a winter’s night in Minneapolis, the sentiment still held true during Shearwater’s performance at the 400 Bar. With the house lights down low, shrouding the stage in dusky shadows, Jonathan Meiburg and Co. brought their sensually melancholy and melodramatic music to a small, appreciative audience of no more than sixty, resulting in an intimate experience unmatched by most musicians today.

Opening with “Black Eyes,” the second track from The Golden Archipelago and one of many to showcase the band’s fondness for driving, staccato keyboard lines, Shearwater immediately commanded attention as Meiburg’s impeccably dense and immensely complex, layered compositions emanated from the twilight recesses of the stage.

With a graceful and elegant spirit, seemingly without effort, Shearwater slid from song to song in a career-spanning setlist substantially focused on pieces from The Golden Archipelago. In their performance, new tracks mixed with old songs in perfect harmony;  the cohesiveness of the setlist, one that promoted the concert as a totality of experience, created the possibility for tremendous fluidity, a fact the band fortified into one of many strengths of their live show.

Band members revealed themselves to be multi-instrumentalists, bouncing from drums to glockenspiel to clarinet in the case of Thor, the band’s percussionist extraordinaire, and juggling guitar or synths and singing with his haunting, choral voice in Meiburg’s case. Throughout the evening, instruments used included, in varying combinations and degrees: electric guitar, bass guitar, electric stand-up bass, synths, drums and percussion of myriad types, glockenspiel, clarinet, and horns. Included in this diversity of Shearwater’s means of music-making were members of both opening bands, Wye Oak and Hospital Ships, who joined the band onstage for several songs.

In the inky black of night, there exists a duality, for the dark is both tranquil and unnerving, menacing and peaceful; Shearwater is also able to toe this potentially contradictory line, moving between whispers and roars with ease. Showing almost unearthly emotional range, the band is able to play raucous, crashing versions of “Rooks,” “Seventy-Four, Seventy-Five,” and “Corridors” with captivating and overwhelming intensity, but in a matter of seconds can flip a switch to perform the restrained subtleties of “I Was a Cloud,” “Nobody,” or “The Snow Leopard.”

Of course, that isn’t to say there were no fumbles along the way. In fact, on two songs, abrupt false starts occurred, but they were more similar to the stumbling of lovers attempting to find one another in the dark than true faults—that is to say, they were not flaws, but rather embodied the poignant and touching intimacy of the show.

Utilizing the profoundly personal nature of the venue and the ambiguities of nightfall, Shearwater created an unforgettable, breathtaking atmosphere of passion and sensuality to disappear into for the audience. On “Castaways” Meiburg sings with conviction, “You are castaways,” but for those twilight hours, nobody was thrown overboard, and instead, we all engaged in the forefront of experience, opening ourselves up to the precariousness of life through the medium of Shearwater’s awe-inspiring, sonorous sounds.—Cassie Traun, Editor