Not sure why it took me this long to pick up on Shearwater’s similarities with Talk Talk. As a Line Out news roundup pointed out yesterday, the band’s latest single includes a live cover of “The Rainbow” from TT’s Spirit of Eden, and boy, Shearwater owes something to that album—the high-key vocals, the smattering of strings, the understated, whomping drums, and, of course, the very British-ness of it all. Lead singer Jon Meiburg has always sounded like a Shakespeare play actor who’s grown tired of simply speaking, now singing every one of his metered thoughts with a bold, breaking fragility as if he breaks out in song when he’s walking down the street or shopping in the supermarket. While that vocal affinity continues in Rook, the new album has begun to really break away from the feeling that the band’s an Okkervil River side project (sure was, of course, complete with Will Sheff being co-songwriter for a long time).

Even last year’s Palo Santo still held on to the southern gothic character of Okkervil River; now, Meiburg has gripped this boat’s wheel, guiding his group over the sea en route to Europe. Before the album’s first song ends, that boat meets its untimely destruction: “As the splinter flies apart, to your bow, to the biggest wave / but your angel’s on holiday / and that wave rises slowly and breaks.” Cue swell of horns, violins, and feedback, then imagine the band flailing in the frigid Atlantic, only to float to a nondescript island where bands like Beirut, Sigur Ros, and Talk Talk have emigrated. Album cornerstone “Home Life” sets roots in this new locale and sees the band do something surprisingly constructive with a silky, jazzy rhythm section. The heap of strings, piano and flutes might’ve sounded like the celebratory gypsy music of Devotchka if Meiburg wasn’t there to make the proceedings more sinister and romantically violent: “Now the boys are away / and such kicks they are having / slashing away at those forest walls with their bitter knives,” he coos, as if he were that overzealous Shakespeare actor pleading with an onion at QFC. There’s a good chunk of rock in this album as well, with both “Rooks” and “The Snow Leopard” nodding toward the band’s Okkervil roots, though the latter steps outside of Okkervil’s desperation for literacy, leaving space for the song’s instrumental heft and allowing a huge riff to ebb and rise until toppling over at the end of the five-minute runtime. Really, stepping back and allowing the tide to tell the story is Rook’s strongest play.

Shearwater opens for Clinic tonight at Neumo’s.