Given the space constraints inherent in music journalism the full merits of the genus Puffinus shearwater will have to be explored another day so as to fully focus on the Shearwater at hand, a group whose stunning third album, Winged Life (Misra Records) blends hazy studio atmospherics with emotionally charged lyricism to create an epic listening experience.

Singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalists Jonathan Meiburg and Will Sheff form the core of Shearwater (and also play together in the ragged and more overtly pastoral-leaning Okkervil River, in which Sheff occupies the frontman role). Their strongly contrasting voices (Meiburg’s a pristine Thom-Yorkean haunted choir boy croon and Sheff’s a tortured and significantly less polished howl that tends to draw incessant Bright Eyes comparisons) share equal time behind the microphone and although one would expect the listening experience to be semi-schizophrenic with two such disparate windpipes at work, Winged Life is surprisingly cohesive.

“Each of us brings the kernel of the song pretty much intact to the other but from then on it’s a very collaborative process,” explains Meiburg via telephone during the band’s first national tour. “There’s sort of a common purpose, we try to get the boat moving in the same direction.” Helping Meiburg and Sheff steer the boat on Shearwater LP no. 3 are long time band members Thor Harris (drums) and Kim Burke (bass) and additional guest musicians Travis Weller on violin and Howard Draper on lap steel. The new sounds energized the group and proved critical to its evolution. “It’s not so much like we brought in extra players for the record as it was the band growing to absorb them,” explains Meirburg. “Both Howard [Draper] and Travis [Weller] were promptly added to the band after we made the record and they’re touring with us right now. So it never really felt like we were pasting on a bunch of stuff to the core of what we did, it was more like the core was just growing.”

Produced by Centro-matic’s Matt Pence Winged Life finds the newly expanded Shearwater sextet a more confident band, abandoning the austere slow-core aesthetic that dominated it’s prior two records and significantly widening the scope of its sound. “That [widening of the sound] was really intentional,” claims Meiburg. “I was sort of frustrated with what we had done before because it was really hard to do a compelling live set with the songs we had on our last record. I wanted to make a record that moved more, something big and expansive that was a little more reflective of what I liked to listen to.”

Meiburg reached his goal - for the first time on a Shearwater record the presence of electric guitars is noticeable, the Wurlitzers and various antiquated organ sounds are pounded out with ferocity, there’s even a bonafide pop song (Sheff’s “A Makeover”). Shearwater still knows how to cut to the quick with harrowing balladry, the lush organ driven “St. Mary’s Walk” is a slice of baroque folk-pop that wouldn’t have felt out of place on 2002’s Everybody Makes Mistakes, but cuts like the sinister banjo led “Whipping Boy” sound like the work of a completely different band.

Although the work of two very different songwriters- Sheff’s compositions tend to be simple acoustic guitar centered tunes, Meiburg’s more ornate piano led pieces - Winged Life is tied together by its lyrics, a set of narrative snippets exploring emotional numbness and hidden fears.

Whether it’s the ambivalent impassioned lover of an infirm girl in “My Good Deed” (“And I saw myself inside her eyes; this shrinking would-be savior / resented her for never needing him and couldn’t wait just to betray her”) or the bedridden man begging for release from his hospital bed in “(I’ve Got A) Right to Cry” (“And this terrible drone is the sound of a thousand machines / singing just to themselves in a language that no one can read”) Sheff and Meiburg flesh out their narrators stories with eye-catching details while still leaving enough blank space for the creative listener to flesh out the rest of the story in their own minds.

In an era where so many great groups have dissolved into singer/songwriters with a revolving door of backing musicians (see: Wilco, My Morning Jacket) encountering a group as democratic and symbiotic as Shearwater is a breath of fresh air. Both men are quick to point out that it’s in the give and take of their collaborative process that the best musical moments are reached. “I’m just one person and my mind is going to repeat itself and the ways that I choose to do things are going to have a certain obsessive return to the same things over and over again,” admits Sheff. “That’s just the way that artists can be. So for that reason I really like working with people who have different ideas than me, and the farther outside of my world they are the better. Jonathan brings a lot to my music. As musicians the differences between us are really pronounced. Jonathan is a really technically good musician with perfect pitch and a lot of knowledge of how to play pretty much anything. And I’m more of like … an idiot (laughs). My approach to music is to try to hammer my way through and make it somehow work on sheer energy and persistence. I’m really not as interested in the musical perfection angle, which is probably a weakness and a strength in some ways, but is definitely a weakness a lot of the time. So it’s really nice to have someone like Jonathan there who comes from the exactly opposite position. I really love it when sort of pristine pop meets ragged ineptitude head on.”

It’s at this compelling intersection of two very different musical aesthetics (the unexpected union of pretty precision and passionate musical pugilism) that Shearwater resides – an exotic location well worth visiting.