Sam Beam and co. perform with more Iron, less Wine

Sam Beam didn’t pick up an acoustic guitar Wednesday at the Orpheum until he was a dozen songs into his mesmerizing 95-minute set with Iron & Wine. For most bands, that bit of information would mean more for the roadies than for the musicians.

But for Beam it signaled a significant change in artistic direction, since over the last few years he’s led Iron & Wine to widespread indie-scene renown (as well as a handful of TV-commercial and movie-soundtrack gigs) with a delicate folk-pop sound centered around Beam’s breathy vocals and his intricate back-porch fingerpicking.

Despite its textural embellishments and its emphasis on groove, the latest Iron & Wine album, “The Shepherd’s Dog,” is too lovely to have provoked much in the way of a backlash. But at the Orpheum, the genial, soft-spoken bandleader seemed to be in the closest thing he’s got to a confrontational mood. (Perhaps he’d just caught a screening of “I’m Not There,” the Bob Dylan biopic whose soundtrack features Iron & Wine’s take, with Calexico, on “Dark Eyes.”)

With his back to the couple-packed audience throughout much of the show, Beam drove his seven-piece group (which included his sister, Sarah, on vocals and violin) like an experienced road veteran, not the timid bedroom troubadour his bearded Everyschlump look suggested.

As on “The Shepherd’s Dog,” the music privileged rhythm over melody; Beam extended many of the selections (including rejiggered material from earlier albums) with surprisingly noisy instrumental codas inspired by dub reggae and West African blues.

Few of Iron & Wine’s indie-folk peers ever creep this close to the land of the jam bands; fewer still do it without inducing snores.

Beam only rarely lowered the volume to a level familiar to old-school Iron & Wine fans. When he did, the contrast accentuated Beam’s ability to imbue the mundane with a sense of mystery, as in “Upward Over the Mountain” (from 2002’s “The Creek Drank the Cradle”), in which he and his sister sang unaccompanied of “the night that the dog had her pups in the pantry.”

That moment provided a close-up, but then the band zoomed out and went widescreen again.