Iron and Wine is otherwise known as Sam Beam, Miami resident and cinematography professor. Many have been intrigued by Iron and Wine’s deliberate delivery of finger-picked guitar accompanied by slide guitar, a melodious banjo and hushed falsetto harmonies. Beam plays all the instruments and records all his music at his Miami home on a primitive four-track, creating a sound that is reminiscent of unplugged Smog or if Pink Moon-era Nick Drake lived in Florida. The songs, however, aren’t as macabre as Drake or as self-defeating as Smog but intimate, like Beam is playing only for himself.

Beam’s debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle (Subpop), was not originally an album but a collection of songs on two CDs submitted to Subpop Records. Subpop pared the two homemade CDs to form Creek and released additional original material late last summer as the five-song EP The Sea and the Rhythm. A new release by Beam is expected to be available on Mar. 23.

The first reaction to Creek is awe of a style that is too often worn out. Beam’s sound does not reinvent the confessional singer-songwriter but adds a new dimension to a sterile genre. The singer-songwriter, acoustic or not, must be the most clapped-out of musical stylings—a shabbily-strummed acoustic guitar and voice is all that is needed. The singer-songwriter remains the most populist of genres requiring no musical genius, but the fresh, creative touches of Beam turn an insipid style into something transcending. Nowhere is more evident than on Creek.

Creek feels as if Beam might be playing on your shoulder, whispering a long list of varied images. Just after one track it’s apparent that Beam is literate. He cares not for hooks and coy one-liners but for images that relay nostalgia. Like on the opener “Lion’s Mane,” Beam sings about, “The rusty gears of morning/And faceless busy phones” to illustrate how the mundane patterns of life are sometimes the most prophetic.

Domestic life and everyday settings are favored by Beam, as if his sleepy voice didn’t want to make you lie around the house. Beam does, in a certain way, come off lazy and physically sedentary but mentally active and intelligent. The songs are fragile bits of eggshell and nighttime echoes that feel like Faulkner’s Mississippi and solitary walks through the shithole called Orlando.

Perhaps the most touching song is “Upward over the Mountain,” a song about a son growing old and leaving his mother behind. As for the majority of Beam’s songs the tone is plaintive and nostalgic but always lingering beneath the surface is reserved optimism that what lies ahead will be undoubtedly better than what just passed.

The success of Creek is that Beam’s introversion is obscure and abstract enough not to limit his audience. Metaphors about rusty trains and old photographs help link the religious overtones of Creek to the five-song, The Sea and the Rhythm EP but do not save Sea from being a tired assemblage of songs that couldn’t quite fit on Creek. The songs on Sea, like the title track, lack the compelling nature of Creek, whose whole overshadows the individual parts. Sea looks like a shabby release just to tide the listener over until next LP. This is not to say that certain songs don’t hold merit, but together they simply lack any climax or coherent direction.

Put to the choice of recommending one or the other, I would side with Creek as the best introduction and representation of Beam’s ability to trap a listener into his own bucolic, southern world of pining and rejection. Sea belongs more to those who have already fallen in love with Beam’s willowed world of burnt Bibles and metered waves. Both, however, do make the listener impatient for what might lie in Beam’s next offering.