This bugger Josh Ritter moves from Idaho to Brooklyn after years of successful international touring with his post-folk catalog and gets writer’s block. The results of which is uncanny and of the quality of “Barton Fink” only more people will understand it. So Runs the World Away is 13 tracks of amazing, subtle, literary and scientifically romantic. So Runs is Josh Ritter’s fifth full-length album, sixth or seventh if you include his first self-released album and/or his live album only available in Ireland. He has learned and evolved across every album and this is no exception. Where Animal Years was distant and cavernous, Historical Conquests was playful and wry, So Runs is complex and mythological. It reads like a brilliant dissertation on folk. Track themes run the gamut of time, monsters, explorers, folk heroes, relativity, and love all woven together to describe each other. The second track, “Change of Time,” featured on the NBC show “Parenthood,” love, time, water and monsters all stand in place of each other. His wife sings backing vocals in a haunting refrain as a slide guitar sways like a boat in a storm and rhythm section pounds on the hull. Next comes “The Curse,” which was, according to every interview and article he has appeared in, the first song written for the album that broke his writer’s block. It took three listens for me to realize it is about a mummy and archaeologist. It is a subtle and lovely waltz without even delving into the lyrics. Next is “Southern Pacifica,” a song that has replaced Modest Mouse’s “Trucker’s Atlas” as the best traveling the country backbeat on the drums. The play on the snare and hi-hat in the verse is the clack of a train as it slowly passes through town and the chorus’ pace is the train striding across the open middle of the country. “Rattling Locks” deserves it’s own paragraph. Josh admits it is the darkest song he has ever written, about standing in the cold and the rain realizing the locks to your home have been changed by your ex. In pre-release concert footage I heard on YouTube I assumed the vocal distortion on this song was a byproduct of the recording. It wasn’t. The vocals are purposely harsh and strained, bled out on the edge of the mic’s range. The loathing and hatred of that break, of someone controlling the boundaries of space, of your relationship, the sacrifices and pain. None of that former love plays out. The percussion is pounded out on emptiness. I learned the hollowness of humanity watching you pass in and out of my life. It also happens to contain the first of my favorite physics metaphors on the album: eyes like black holes. Next the album turns to fatal confrontations between folk heroes, lighthearted skippings of love poems (with another killer physics metaphor), a brilliantly solid Springsteen-inspired rocker, and a horse-thief chase which may or may not be about chasing the remainder of what you were and what you wanted to be. Then it hits a small low point of “See How Man Was Made,” which is a crooning lonely song about not much else except not being alone. But that turns around with a truly remarkable story of loneliness in “Another New World.” An explorer, alone in the masses of society, convinces a chartering club that there is a new world above the north pole and charges off into the arctic circle to be with his ship, the Annabell Lee. The story twists and turns with no resolution. Next to last is my favorite song, “Orbital.” It is the only song Josh doesn’t play on on any of his albums. It is what love would be if it could be described by relativity. Much like the endearing love that blooms between two unlikely survivors in a missile silo during WWIII from Historical conquests, it hits on all marks while diving into complex scientific territory. A drumline cadence introduces a swirling, twisting array of instruments I cannot even identify. The chorus is simply humming while the world opens up and orbits around the sound. Love as mass transforming to light as it accelerates, as “every time you come around, the room lights up and time slows down…” The album ends as all of Josh’s do, on a simple light number. This time it is about dispelling fear. He talks of this album as being grown, being past those moments of trying to make it, having fought and lost and won. “Long Shadows” plays to that. Since this album was released I cannot stand to put it down. It surpasses expectations built by previous outings and makes its own mark. In some ways it brings the sound back around to his earlier albums while retaining what he has learned. Pick it up and check out one of his tour dates to see a really amazing and authentic performance.
|
|
