Iron and Wine - Boy With A Coin EP

You are most probably going to say that you do not know Iron and Wine and that you have never ever heard a song by Iron and Wine, well you are likely to be wrong on that account. Sam Beam is the man that is it all, classed as folk rock, singer-songwriter and indie folk, it is soft music.
So where did you hear Iron and Wine? If you saw the film “Garden State”, you will have heard some Iron and Wine squeezed into all those songs by the Shins. It is “Such Great Heights” a cover of the Postal service that gets played. It is also probable that the first time you heard Ben Gibbard’s song you actually heard the Iron and Wine cover of it, it was released before the Postal Service released their version of it, you can find the cover and original on the “Such Great Heights EP”.
“Boy With A Coin” is a three song EP, two of the tracks have not been released anywhere else but on this EP, and the title track is a song of the newest Iron and Wine album, “The Shepherd’s Dog”. This EP is amazing, it is handmade music, and Beam plays and experiments with instruments and the sounds that he can get out of them. As a result the songs have a beautiful sound to them, with dream like lyrics. These lyrics are quite simple, “the kettle burned because I left it too long”, beautiful and at times sad. He includes the notion of religion, “that’s how she knows that God made her eyes for crying at birth”. Love is like almost always an important theme, “we were kissing with the radio on”.
It is music that you can listen to at almost any time. It is relaxing, so it will not disturb you while reading, studying or just putting up your feet to take a deep breath. And if you like listening to some tunes while going to sleep this is something perfect to listen to, the music calms you down and you are asleep right away, it’s like hypnosis.
Iron and Wine is definitely something different, just look at pictures of Sam Beam or listen to the music. You will probably like it if you do like Death Cab or the Shins and other bands along those lines, if that is the case Iron and Wine is the right thing for you. But it is also more or less a mistake to compare Iron and Wine to those bands because it defers so much from them. Iron and Wine is just Iron and Wine, very simple beautiful music that should be listened to, but that is not really made for radio.

Review by Solveig Werner