This must be Matt Ward's fifth album. It is recognisably the same M. Ward that I love to sneak onto my iTunes when I need some elusive healing melody. The same M. Ward who made the secretly treasured "Transistor Radio" album early last year. The same M. Ward who Whisperin' and Hollerin' has loved down the years. I even get several moments of déjà vu. I know these songs already, I remember them from a distant time before I had even heard of the Oregon singer songwriter, way back in the last millennium.
That's all part of the magic. The album is an altogether livelier affair than Transistor Radio (although it would be hard to beat the rollicking jollity of that album's "Big Boat"). The reason seems to be the inclusion of the band who we wrote about in Glasgow last month. They give it (and him) a bit of a kick and stop him getting glum and lonesome.
Some of the songs have glumness in them. It wouldn’t be Ward if they didn't. "Poison Cup" opens with a dragged slur of a vocal and a wavering spectral Mellotron that could break any heart, or destroy anyone whose heart was already broken. "I need all of your love" he sings, with suicidal longing. The band nudge their way in, pick up the tempo just a little and the song gradually turns into more of a paean, ending with "I forgive you anything". And then, in the more album-defining feel of "To Go Home" (a cover of the DANIEL JOHNSTON song) the band pound some drums to get going, add harmony and a brisker tempo and we have a near-party going. Johnston's line "God, its great to be alive, takes the skin right off my eye to think I'll have to give it all up some day", comes out (both times) as typically M. Ward chunks of morbid joy. And lively with it.
The things I really want to tell you about this album are quite simple though. It has Ward's unerring sense of delicate, haunting, but utterly catchy melody. He sings beautifully, the band play varied sparkling music and the whole thing is as life-affirming as you're going to get from an intelligent American in dark times.
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Ward's fondness for found sounds and added bits and pieces is given a welcome outing for the last minute of "Right In The Head". The song has finished, flies buzz and birds sing in a warm dreamy summer while a gramophone is playing a record of a violin somewhere in the distance. The mood is entranced and we slip imperceptibly and unhurried into the beauty and nostalgia of "Post-War" itself. We are buffered from the pulse of the world, but brought close to tears of regret and half-remembered pain by a song that will be (like "Undertaker") one of those tunes that live audiences will demand to hear forever. I feel obsessive about it already.
"Requiem" is a song that any man would be proud to have played at his funeral. "He was a good man and now he's gone." It ends on huge drums, a crying rasp of guitar solo and a second, unhinged drummer throwing things around. "Magic Trick" is presented as if live with a cheering audience. It's a good silly song, well worth one minute 42 just to make sure that the rueful side of life doesn’t take over in the last third of the album. It's also a great warm-up for the delicious surf instrumental of "Neptune's Net".
Ward's sublime guitar picking and fondness for a walking blues tempo ripple though the album. A "Singin' The Blues" styled "Rollercoaster" has neat guitar and a comfortable old-timey piano. There's a divine-sounding injunction to create beautiful music in "Today's Undertaking" and there are memory-refracted echoes of someone like MISSISSIPPI FRED McDOWELL in the finale: "Afterword/Rag".
It’s a subtle album. The closer you listen, the more treasures offer themselves up.
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