The product of a shotgun-wedding collaboration between Kingfisher's Jonathan Meiburg and Okkervil River's Will Sheff, Shearwater plumbs the depths of human despair in both sound and lyric on The Dissolving Room. Starting with Nick Drake's Pink Moon as an ideal, Meiburg and Sheff cling to a decidedly morose vision of dying uncles, sickly lovers, and wandering ghosts. In short, it's not light listening. Couched in simple acoustic textures with pianos, banjos, cellos, and harmonicas filling out the mix, a deep sense of tragic and timid vulnerability bleeds through the album's 12 tracks and becomes the set's overriding essence. Balanced between Meiburg's delicate croon and Sheff's scratchy croak, a pervasive sadness saturates the recordings, finding an even more humorless aesthetic than like-minded artists such as Will Oldham or Bill Calahan. Honestly, the morbidity can run a bit thick at times, though the burnt-out pedal steel of tracks like "Military Clothes" or the tingling wind chimes of "The Left Side" are as notable for their exhausted beauty as they are for their depressing vision. ~ Matt Fink