June 17-24, 2004

musicpicks

Iron & Wine/Cass McCombs

ROCK/POP

Sam Beam isn't miserable. Honest. Sure, his downbeat one-man-band Iron & Wine makes Neal Halstead look like Neil Sedaka. And sure, Our Endless Numbered Days (Sub Pop) fixates extensively on death. But Beam views the great hereafter as the only certain thing about life, the cycling conclusion we all experience. Consequently, he meditates upon it as something to embrace, not eschew. Iron & Wine's first venture into a proper studio, Days is still sparse and intimate like the lo-fi The Creek Drank the Cradle. Folksy guitar and solitary banjo back Beam's whispered voice, which chills as he studies lovers tenderly agreeing to scatter one another's ashes ("If I leave before you, darling/ don't you waste me in the ground.") and recounts the final optimistic thoughts of an unjustly lynched man, presumably a slave in the old South ("When the men take me to the devil tree/ I will be free and shining like before.").

Baltimore newcomer Cass McCombs (pictured) opens Beam's Khyber gig Wednesday with less direct musings. A sense of transience permeates his debut A (Monitor Records), but his approach is much more Loaded-era Velvet Underground; nostalgic compositions from the infancy of rock met with a skewed lyrical outlook. Still, the leadoff "I Went to the Hospital" hits it head-on — "Is it dying that terrifies you/ or just being dead?" Whichever way you go, it will be an evening to kick back and ponder your own mortality.

Wed., June 23, 9 p.m., $10, with Langtry, The Khyber, 56 S. Second St., 215-569-9700.