“The Golden Archipelago” is the third album in a triptych of mindblowingly beautiful, dense and ambitious excursions about man’s impact on the natural world from Austin’s SHEARWATER.
This time singer-songwriter Jonathan Meiburg turns his attention to life on islands – a world of lushness and austerity, silence and sudden cataclysms. From rising sea levels to displaced populations, Meiburg travels from the Falklands to Madgascar, from the Bikini Atoll to the Tierra Del Fuego.
The music matches the grandeur and melancholy of its subject matter. This is a true album in the larger sense of the word. Meiburg’s soaring vocals and complex song structures recall opuses like Kate Bush’s “Hounds Of Love,” Hüsker Dü’s “Zen Arcade” and classic Pink Floyd.
The CD comes packaged with a 50-page perfect-bound book that is a set of extracts from a dossier of records, photos, regulations and images collected by Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg. The LP contains 2 bonus tracks & an MP3 download coupon (that includes the album + PDF of the dossier). (Note: LP pre-orders will ALSO receive a copy of the CD-sized perfect bound book.)
Serious researchers will have a way to obtain the actual, full-sized, full-color 73-page dossier in its special envelope – this will be announced soon, so keep your eyes on this space.
Preorder the album, and get a 15% discount plus the extras noted above.
Below is the first MP3 from The Golden Archipelago, “Castaways.” You can just play the MP3, or you can download a zip file containing either a 256K MP3 or a FLAC of the track, along with a digital single artwork and some images from book extracts of the dossier:
Castaways (192k mp3)
Castaways (zipfile of 256k mp3, single artwork, dossier pages)
Castaways (zipfile of FLAC, single artwork, dossier pages)
Shearwater will be touring Europe and the US the spring. US dates still to be announced; European dates are as follows:
17 Feb: Melkweg – Amsterdam (NL)
18 Feb: Botanique – Brussel (B)
19 Feb: Le Nouveau Casino – Paris (F)
20 Feb: La Route du Rock winter edition @ L’Omnibus – Saint-Malô (F)
21 Feb: The Freebutt – Brighton (UK)
22 Feb: The Brudenell Social Club – Leeds (UK)
23 Feb: Captains Rest – Glasgow (UK)
25 Feb: Scala – London (UK)
26 Feb: 4AD – Diksmuide (B)
27 Feb: Knust – Hamburg (D)
28 Feb: Magnet club – Berlin (D)
2 Mar: Rote Sonne – Munich (D)
3 Mar: L’Usine (PTR) – Geneva (CH)
4 Mar: Nouveau Monde – Fribourg (CH)
5 Mar: La Casa 139 – Milan (I)
shearwatermusic.com
matadorrecords.com/shearwater
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