Having seen this album on so many “Best of 2004″ lists, I thought it deserved some attention this week. I would have to agree with the many lists praising Iron and Wine. Although the acoustic folk feel draws valid comparisons to Sufjan Stevens, Devandra Banhart, and some of the other new folk pioneers, it is Iron and Wine’s poetry that really stands out to me. I will end with a quote from a great review of Our Enless Numbered Days over at Pitchfork that really nails the album better than I ever could:

“The song-as-poem critical course has been applied to Beam before, but the accuracy of the analogy never wanes: Beam and Deck toy with syntax and meter, using shaky bits of percussion, volume shifts, and tempo changes to mimic the twitchy movement of the best epic poetry. In the past, Beam’s lyrics have proved his linguistic prowess, but it’s the eerie lyricism of the instrumentation that ultimately pushes Our Endless Numbered Days deep into the canon of American verse.”