When Levon Helm and The Band hosted a five-hour send-off concert in 1976, it was a musical event of mythic proportions. The Band and its guests—among them Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell—were torchbearers of the American folk revival. And though it might be overly dramatic to say the movement “ended” with The Last Waltz, it was just a few years later that folk, blues, and gospel-soul began yielding pop to the second British invasion, arena rock, grunge, and hip-hop.

It would be likewise overdramatic to equate Sunday’s Route 29 Revue at Merriweather to The Last Waltz—certainly in terms of importance. But those attendees who’ve made a religious custom of watching the eponymous Scorcese film could not deny the aesthetic similarities. Old Crow Medicine Show, Iron and Wine, the Felice Brothers, and Grace Potter and the Nocturnals are very much torchbearers of the second folk revival, the one that began in the mid-’90s and has broadened in the new millenium thanks to the Web revolution and the consequent fragmentation of pop. Presiding over Sunday’s festival was Helm, the godfather.

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In seven short years, Iron and Wine’s songs have evolved from single-cell lullabies to prog-folk ecosystems. Sam Beam’s last album, The Shepherd’s Dog, was full of high-intensity mosaics layered with click-clack percussion, electric guitars, voice filters, etc. His newest fans probably wouldn’t recognize the guy plucking deliberately on The Creek Drank the Cradle, The Sea and the Rhythm, and Our Endless Numbered Days.

Read More “Album Review: Around the Well by Iron and Wine” »