Sam Beam concocts a heady brew for Iron & Wine

Iron & WINE’S Sam Beam is an unlikely rock star, but he makes an even more unlikely pan-ethnic world music experimentalist. Beam, whose name rarely appears in print without the words “beard,” “folkie” or “ ‘Garden State’ soundtrack” nearby, has always been a more devious writer and arranger than most fans give him credit for. Early albums of his crackly, intimate fingerpicking were tense with images of love as a tentative escape from Southern poverty, racism and myth.

But as of 2005’s mini-album “Woman King,” Beam began exploring how percussion and distortion fit into his folk miniatures, and on his collaboration with Calexico, “In the Reins,” he fronted a whip-smart spaghetti-western rock band. On his third full-length album, “The Shepherd’s Dog,” Beam goes even further abroad, finding space for West African blues, acid-addled ragas and gut-rumbling R&B; in his vignettes. It’s a pretty record, but Zach Braff and Natalie Portman probably couldn’t make out to it. “I don’t like the idea of doing the same record twice,” Beam said. “We were lucky to have songs that were subversive enough to try different things. The older records were so minimal, to really throw down would have seemed out of place.”

For a guy whose 2002 solo debut took the idea of sepia-toned to uncharted heights, Beam has found an unlikely thread between folk music from Bamako and Bollywood to west Texas. “White Tooth Man” has cops and beauty queens musing over a hypnotic sitar and slide guitar, while the eerie bass hum of “Peace Beneath the City” evokes Julee Cruise playing in a bleak Memphis juke joint.

From such a love song aficionado, “Shepherd’s Dog” has moments where it’s downright harrowing. Beam blames the national mood, where threats to life and limb seem to lurk in every shadow, no matter your party affiliation.

“The record’s not really focused on politics,” Beam said. “But when Bush was reelected, there was this moment of grand, violent shift where I thought I knew the people around me and it turned out I didn’t.”

Instead of friendly neighbors, Beam’s lyrics are rife with wolves, devils, sharp teeth, buzzards and bones. “Shepherd’s Dog” is Beam’s richest and most exotic album yet, not least because it’s also his scariest.

“I’m not a particularly macabre person,” Beam said. “But any time you have a setting, you have to have a conflict.”

-- August.Brown@latimes.com

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IRON & WINE

WHERE: Orpheum Theatre, 842 S. Broadway, L.A.

WHEN: 8 p.m. Wednesday

PRICE: $27

INFO: (877) 677-4386; www.laorpheum.com/calendar