Iron & Wine: Our Endless Numbered Days [SUB POP]

Why you'll love it

This Sub Pop LP comes with a download code for the full album. Metacritic scores it 84 from 21 reviews, and "Passing Afternoon" closed out the fourth season of House.

This edition

• Download card included

About the album

Sam Beam made his first album alone at home on a four-track, which is about as close as a record gets to sitting in the room with someone. For the follow-up he went to Brian Deck's Engine Studios in Chicago in the summer of 2003, brought in a band, and somehow kept every bit of that hush.

Beam plays guitars, slide, banjo and mandolin, with Deck on drums and keyboards, EJ Holowicki on bass, Patrick McKinney on electric guitar and his sister Sarah Beam adding harmonies. "Naked As We Came" is the gentle heart-stopper, "Cinder And Smoke" and "Free Until They Cut Me Down" wander into darker Southern gothic country, and "Sodom, South Georgia" and "Passing Afternoon" bring things home softly. The album takes its title from a line in that last song.

Its songs went on to soundtrack Grey's Anatomy, The L Word and the film In Good Company, and Claire Fuller named her 2015 debut novel after it. It is also the best record in the shop to drink tea to, and we have done a great deal of research.

Also at Kops: more Iron & Wine on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Sub Pop (cat# SP 630), a reissue of the 2004 album.