less speaking like silence

At a time when lowered economic expectations and enough empty promises for your trouble are becoming the rules of the game, it’s not unexpected that the comfort of soulfully stewed folk songs like those on the new M. Ward album often speaks more to me than the regular hedonistic pop fare – plunge into the familiar canyons of shuffling acoustic guitars of “Absolute Beginners” and Hold Time immediately feels like home again.

Ward has had such a terrific run of form on his last three records that are just about three of my favorite albums over the last ten years – the surreally morbid folk outing Transfiguration of Vincent (2003), the distant found sounds and timeless Americana painstakingly resurrected on Transistor Radio (2005), the aching widescreen nostalgia of Post-War (2006) – that a slight dip in quality, when and if it comes on Hold Time, is understandable. Yet Ward’s latest is thoroughly enjoyable if less cohesive as a whole than his last three albums, and I have only one real quibble: that I had very little use for Ward’s overdrawn duet with Lucinda Williams on the old country standard “Oh Lonesome Me”.

First off, it is not a M. Ward record unless it comes with the electricity of ghosts that speak like silence. I got no real idea which Blake he’s referring to but the quiet grace of “Blake’s View” (“Birth is just a chorus, death is just a verse/ In the great song of spring that the mockingbirds sing”) feels very much like the songwriter contemplating the threshold of someone’s apocalypse. The haunted presence on the title track (“And I wrote this song about it, ‘cause I didn’t care about anyone in this photograph”) is given the plush strings treatment to create the grand, mournful emotional impact for listeners to fully luxuriate in. And as for the pained geography of the instrumental “Outro” that closes this album, it is basically Ward covering “I’m A Fool To Want You”, the song that Billie Holiday made famous on her tortured masterpiece Lady In Satin (1958).

Elsewhere, Hold Time is remarkable too for the less heavy feelings and a curious range of joys evoked on the other songs; “Never Had Nobody Like You” and “To Save Me” in particular must rank among the most pepped-up numbers in the Ward catalogue, for a refreshing change. Where we used to be lulled in by the hazy ruinous beauty of his haunted folklores, Hold Time projects a more consummately charmed direction for M. Ward, and turns out that’s not half bad.