The Creek Drank The Cradle (studio album) by Iron & Wine
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Iron & Wine bestography
The Creek Drank The Cradle is ranked 2nd best out of 16 albums by Iron & Wine on BestEverAlbums.com.
The best album by Iron & Wine is Our Endless Numbered Days which is ranked number 1141 in the list of all-time albums with a total rank score of 1,561.
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The Creek Drank The Cradle track list
The tracks on this album have an average rating of 80 out of 100 (all tracks have been rated).
Top-rated track as rated by BestEverAlbums.com members.
The Creek Drank The Cradle rankings
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The Creek Drank The Cradle collection
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The Creek Drank The Cradle ratings
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Showing latest 5 ratings for this album. | Show all 173 ratings for this album.
Rating | Date updated | Member | Album ratings | Avg. album rating |
---|---|---|---|---|
02/28/2024 16:17 | Skerns | 4,460 | 79/100 | |
02/04/2024 20:04 | asimpkins | 2,007 | 68/100 | |
06/19/2023 09:41 | NoisyBeast | 13,126 | 74/100 | |
06/06/2023 23:51 | alexandermause | 1,460 | 86/100 | |
05/23/2023 02:17 | Jibb | 1,105 | 83/100 |
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Outliers can be removed when calculating a mean average to dampen the effects of ratings outside the normal distribution. This figure is provided as the trimmed mean. A high standard deviation can be legitimate, but can sometimes indicate 'gaming' is occurring. Consider a simplified example* of an item receiving ratings of 100, 50, & 0. The mean average rating would be 50. However, ratings of 55, 50 & 45 could also result in the same average. The second average might be more trusted because there is more consensus around a particular rating (a lower deviation).
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This album is rated in the top 3% of all albums on BestEverAlbums.com. This album has a Bayesian average rating of 77.2/100, a mean average of 76.2/100, and a trimmed mean (excluding outliers) of 77.5/100. The standard deviation for this album is 14.2.
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What a beautiful album. It has an ambience like no other that I've heard. Its sound alone is able to evoke the same feelings that whole places can. Close your eyes, and you are sitting in some dry woodland, some forgotten barn, some rustic homestead on the frontier. How does he do it? I'm not sure. But he does it so damn well.
90/100 (Excellent)
HOMEGROWN
You're a poem of mystery
You're the prayer inside me
Spoken words like moonlight
You're the voice that I like (Faded From The Winter)
Sub Pop almost didn’t make it. No. I don’t mean the grunge years. That was a given. No matter how improbable it seemed at the time. You just couldn’t keep that much talent - Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains in particular - from going big. Seattle was going to blow. It was just a matter of time. Hair metal beckoned a correction. Metal had gone adrift way too far into the seas of cheese. A hard tack was in the cards.
No. I’m taking about the rebirth. In the late 90s. Sub Pop was on its knees. Internal mutinies were plotted. Hell, even co-founder Bruce Pavitt wanted to call it quits.
But not Jonathan Poneman. Poneman’s a lot like us. A music junkie. Addicted to the process of discovery. Finding that next musical high. That next big thing. That new sound. That’s right. Poneman of Sub Pop fame is a music addict just like us. And in the late 90s, he was desperately trying to jumpstart his once proud grunge behemoth Sub Pop. And by being a super music geek, Poneman pulled off one of the most successful rebrands of a record label in rock history. First came the The Shins Oh Inverted World. But no industry rests and Poneman needed to prove that Sub Pop was no longer just a grunge label. After all, with the Nicklebacks splashing in Puddles of Mudd 3 Doors Down, grunge or Sub Pop was hardly hip anymore. Quite the opposite.
And he found it. After countless hours of listening to demo after demo after demo. He got that rush all over again. Finding Sam Beam baring his soul on an old demo tape. And there was magic there. No studio trickery. No band. Just Beam channeling Appalachalia into his bedroom. Channeling a campfire that never was. And this is the power of imagination. He made an a lo-fi Appalachian album. Call it lo fi indie if you want. The setting tell us to do so. The record label tells us to do so. Hell Allmusic compares it to Sebadoh. But the songs. The voice. The slide guitar. That banjo. They tell us differently.
Reality check: I am NOT like Poneman. AT ALL. I just think I am. I let other people do my dirty work. You won’t catch me going through random demos looking for gold. EVER. It’s never happened. It never will happen. Shit, I didn’t even have any patience with those CMJ comps that would get mailed to my door back in the day. There’s tons of undiscovered gems out there. I just let other people find them for me. Thanks, BEA! Thanks, Spin! Thanks, Pitchfork! Thanks, Trouser Press and all the other countless lists I've scoured for the next fix. (Luckily, for all of us, I possess something called INSIGHT. That means I’m aware of my own shortcomings. I can see and more importantly smell my own pile of bullshit. Some people do not have this! They do not even realize that they shit! But more on this at another date.)
Allmusic tries to connect this album to Sebadoh/Sentridoh and the lo-fi indie rock of the early 90s. But that’s bullshit. Sebadoh always felt neatly nestled in the indie rock universe. A logical and necessary part of it. This doesn’t. This is all its own. Even more so than Oh Inverted World.
The problem with a lot of projects on this scale - one man bands in a bedroom- is that the songs can start to sound a like. Which is understandable. I mean it’s just one guy after all. In his bedroom. But this album completely bucks that notion as each song sounds distinct. Unique. The whole album somehow growing stronger as it travels along. Beam sent Poneman two albums worth of demos, and Poneman chiseled them down to this one record. A good editor is so underrated!
Grade: A+. I really don’t know how Poneman did it back it the early 2000s. First the Shins and then this. He definitely deserves more credit since both albums sounded like nothing else at the time. Now we take the whole Indie Folk scene for granted. Plus they each came with their own identity. Their own mystique. Hell even the album title - The Creek Drank the Cradle - sounds like an old fable. Biblical in nature. It has this recorded in obscurity home vibe mystique to it. And neither The Shins nor Iron & Wine would ever quite capture that again despite continued success. Something other worldly. Like from an old radio station left behind by the Dharma Initiative. Something that would be playing down in that old hatch while Desmond waited around to push the button. To save the world. It was like you were being let in on this secret world. Something apart yet parallel to our own. And this album climbs out of that hatch an into the sunshine. No longer Lost on a desert island, a desert bedroom but rising high among the indie greats to number 16.
Sam Beam announced himself to the music world with this masterpiece of personal reflection and poetic story-telling set to a stripped-back acoustic guitar. Many an evening I spent sitting on the front verandah of my inner-city house, listening to the peace-inducing melody of this album as I watched the world go by. It is one of the few albums that legitimately transports you to another, better world and it still sits as his best effort despite the slick production and added band members on future releases. In fact, it's the 4-track bedroom recordings that best capture his contemplative poetry and is what his fans are most drawn to. I have seen him live twice. The first time was after his second album and every track he performed was quiet and there was a respect from the crowd as our focus was drawn to him. The second time I saw him there were more of his upbeat, band-assisted songs and it wasn't until his quieter songs were performed that the crowd were truly captivated.
Really unique album. It does a great job of capturing the southern-indie-folk vibe - the lo-fi definitely adds to the aura of it. Has four great tracks, the rest are just okay. Lyrically great all the way through.
Best tracks: Upward Over The Mountain, Lion's Mane, Weary Memory, Promising Light
(I know a lot of people like Bird Stealing Bread, but it's never had much of an effect on me)
One of the great lo-fi recordings.
Listened to this today on a long drive through the New Hampshire hills during peak foliage. It was absolutely perfect.
This is such a clean and simple record. It's easy to imagine it was recorded decades ago on a farmhouse porch. It captures the feeling of life in the US South in a way that southern rock never could.
Love the slide guitars, and the general southern laid back vibe. Feels like a cd that should be playing on the front porch of some southern farm or something. To me the album gets better as it progresses.
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