Shearwater

★★★ The Great Awakening POLYBORUS. CD/DL/LP

Avid birder leads AustinTexas outfit into late-period Talk Talk terrain.

Life looks rich for Shearwater linchpin Jonathan Meiburg. His ornithological globetrotting yielded a book on caracara falcons, 2021’s A Most Remarkable Creature, praised by Margaret Atwood and Laurie Anderson, and now comes his band’s immersive seventh album, their first LP in six years. Peppered with natural world field recordings, and a sizeable left-field advance on 2016 protest album Jet Plane And Oxbow, it peaks with Xenarthran, a song inspired by Texan armadillos whose imaginatively curated textures evoke the bustling undergrowth of Björk’s Human Behaviour. Elsewhere, as Talk Talk-like guitar fragments chime or crash, Highgate erupts with tectonic drama, and Meiburg’s close-miked voice nests somewhere between Mark Hollis and Morten Harket, these opaque, often uneasy sounding songs conjure nature’s unpredictability and vulnerability as well as its beauty. The vibe is very much that of a disquieted David Attenborough testifying to camera.