Locced Down

“In case you were wondering, you guys don’t sound so good,” shouted a fan. “I think it might be the reverb.”

And thus was Thursday night’s Iron and Wine show opened to the bustling court of public opinion. From the eaves of the Orpheum came a volley of jeers and wet hisses; someone in the front row told frontman Sam Beam that he had a great beard. (”Thanks, man,” Beam said politely.) “I think you sound great,” opined a gravel-voiced public defender. Cheers. And at last - after that interminable break - Beam swung back into gear.

Iron and Wine, an acoustic pop band from Florida, has long engendered a peculiar sort of intimacy among its fans. It’s the sort of intimacy that allows an audience gathered in a large concert hall to feel like they were perched across from Beam in a coffee shop, mired in a hot-blooded give and take. This is largely a credit to Beam, who has a deeper emotional investment in every song than most artists do in entire albums.

This week, Iron and Wine released its third full-length album, “The Shepherd’s Dog.” It’s being sold with a fresh back story: Beam, who previously recorded albums mostly alone, has finally written his big, glossy band album, full of roots influences and driven by a chug-chug cadence. (At the Orpheum, Beam was accompanied by seven instrumentalists, including two drummers and his sister, Sarah Beam, on violin.) This isn’t wrong, exactly. But it does imply a dissolution of an aesthetic that Iron and Wine had always prized. What’s the distance between one man playing sad, simple songs, and a man conducting a blues orchestra?

Far, as it turns out, but not so far that you ever forget that this is a Sam Beam production, penned under the same lyrical tradition. At the Orpheum, Iron and Wine relied heavily on songs from “The Shepherd’s Dog” - songs with grandiose titles like “Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car” and “Lovesong of the Buzzard.” Near the end of “House by the Sea,” Beam chanted, “And I’ve been dreaming our love and our freedom.”

On past albums, when Beam delivered this sort of stuff over a hushed guitar tapestry, critics called it Southern gothic, a literary reference that did much to evoke Iron and Wine’s bookish charm. Now, with bongos and pedal steel in tow, Beam has gotten quirkier and possibly even wry. Still, Iron and Wine is a heart-on-sleeve project, the kind that can trot out lines like “Papa died smiling” and have audiences understand both the words and the inspiration.© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.More from Boston.comMore:Globe Living/Arts stories

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