Every now and then, an artist becomes the figurehead of his genre not because he melts into the gimmick of the day, but because he fortuitously defines it, exceeds its expectations, and ultimately supersedes it altogether. Sam Beam's mollifying voice and arresting lyrics simultaneously thrust him atop the indie pedestal and entrenched him in a miry bog of lo-fi pseudo-folk that has a hairy habit of imbibing even the most promising potential. If The Shepherd's Dog, with its ticklish dabbling in world music, was a somewhat flummoxed, slightly shanked arrow, Kiss Each Other Clean is the ambitious target to which Beam meant to guide his strange, deviant jungle tones all along.
The opening track is as varied as the most muddled songs on The Shepherd's Dog but as focused any loom-woven four-chord pop song; "Walking Far From Home" lands ably somewhere in between. The poised melody trails behind the chord changes in a way we've heard a million times before, but the oft-hung drapes loll more charmingly over Beam's opulent lyrical lunette. Lead single "Tree By The River" makes an early play at the summer airwaves, though it faces a snub because "Maryanne, do you remember the tree by the river when we were seventeen?" may not be suggestive enough for America's desensitized trend manufacturers and consumers; wherever Beam's head is when he's writing these stilling songs, it's nowhere near the new millennium ... and the sub-mainstream music landscape is all the more wholesome for it, even if he drops a F-bombs in the marginally cheeky "Monkeys Uptown."
