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Iron & Wine review – shadow puppets and folk-pop combine in singular gig

Emmy award-winning puppeteers Manual Cinema occasionally pull focus from Sam Beam’s rich songwriting, but mostly enhance it with eerie and intricate staging

Although Iron & Wine is a one-man musical project, Beam is joined by seven collaborators tonight: there are the musicians – covering strings, keys and drums – and then there are the puppeteers: two artists from the Emmy award-winning Manual Cinema work three projectors. With his long grey beard and dark suit, Beam cuts a prophetic figure on stage, as he digs into Iron & Wine’s six-album-deep discography with songs such as Me and Lazarus and Resurrection Fern. Beam’s songwriting is already rich in imagery, so on a song such as Cutting It Close, the storybook tale being told with dancing shadow puppets distracts rather than aids the imagination.

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