August is the biggest month of year for the music industry. Albums drop like pennies from heaven/flies. Because there's so many frikkin' albums out right now worth talking about, all week long, tMR ill be all music-all the time.
Josh Ritter
The Historical Conquests of Josh RitterSony BMG/Victor
You're looking at the best album of the year. Already a critical darling for the song 'Wings' and last year's Iraq War-tinged
The Animal Years, Ritter decided this time out to craft something less serious, lest he wind up America's answer to David Grey. So he hauled up to Maine, put down the guitar and created a piano centric album recorded in the kitchen of his trumpeter. So what happens when you deliberately aim for the unpolished? Well, if you're Josh Ritter, you go supernova. Listening to
Historical Conquests must be like what it felt for people who liked Springsteen and then heard
Born to Run. It's that moment where you stop thinking of an artist as a "cool singer" and say, "This guy is the voice of something. Something I want in on."
If
The Animal Years was out on the plains,
Conquests has the feel of an impromptu concert thrown at a roadside stand on some forgotten stretch of Rockies highway. It opens with
To the Dogs or Whoever, a Whitmanesque yawlp of a reel that's part ska, part sea shanty and references Joan of Ark, Christ, The Maid of Orleans, Jonah's whale, Casey Jones and a pair of underwear.
Mind's Eye is one of those songs you stumble home drunk to, with purpose, right before you decide to set it on fire.
Right Moves is very likely to be the single that will turn Josh Ritter into a superstar. It's an upbeat tune about being broken-up and wanting to get back, that's a declarative fanfare. Sample lyric: "I said that we are like the Northern sky/ There are things that come between us that we can't take back and we can't make right/ And you said, I don't know darling, but I'm here with you and we're coming to the chorus now".
This song segues into a piece called
The Temptation of Adam, a ballad about a guy and a girl trapped in a nuclear missile fallout shelter that implies the end of the world and also the beginning. It's also a wonderful love song.
Open Doors has a great bass and drum line.
Rumours is a full out synth and piano that basically renders a large part of the Billy Joel oeuvre irrelevant (in so much as it's styled as the music of angry working folk-- which, you know, it was--once upon a time). It's as driving as a Jack White tune, but where White sings with swagger, Ritter's style is coolly menacing.
Wait For Love takes Ritter back out onto the Plains with his guitar, just to remind you he can.
Real Long Distance is the one really goofy song on the album and really the sleeper of the piece. I ignored it the first dozen or so times I heard it, till one day, on the 12 billionth refrain of "It's the real long distance call", I started grinning like crazy.
Next to the Last True Romantic is basically going to be the the theme song of
The Modern Romantic. Sample lyric: "He's stolen hearts like they're horses and horses when hearts can't be found." It's probably the coolest Western Swing song you will ever hear.
The album nears the end with
Empty Hearts, which is really just a plain ol' country song, only by this point it's obvious that Ritter has rediscovered/ saved country from itself.
The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter is cowboy music, to be sure, but it's more than that: It's the sound of America.
Out Aug. 21.
Preview the album here.
Labels: music
Josh Ritter