Featured — By Neil Riddell on 14/04/12
"He continues to be masterful at funnelling exquisite new wine into dusty old bottles…"
M. Ward | A Wasteland Companion
In a sense M. Ward is a victim of his own success. With his success as a prolific producer and collaborator meaning many a fingers are in many a pie, his own solo work has been rather sidelined of late. Since his last long-player was released in early 2009, he has put out a second volume of his Grammy-nominated yet opinion-dividing She & Him project with actress Zooey Deschanel (followed by last year's collection of Christmas songs) and recorded and toured with tongue-in-cheek supergroup Monsters of Folk. Then there was Tired Pony, a 2010 mishmash featuring members of R.E.M. and Belle & Sebastian, along with the dreary Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody.
Though the She & Him collaboration has its moments, arguably only his work with the folkie monsters comes close to matching the diverse riches to be found in Ward's solo releases. With 2005′s Transistor Radio he created a truly timeless masterpiece, albeit one which slipped undetected past most people's radars. Though he has since opted for glossier production, both Post-War and Hold Time showed his songwriting well is far from running dry.
A Wasteland Companion is no overhaul of his latter-day template. Ward mines all manner of vintage sounds, be it contemplative, melancholic and deftly finger-picked acoustic numbers, barroom blues, rockabilly or rudimentary power pop, all topped off with his underrated vocal rasp. There is no sign of a return to the Portland troubadour's lower fi beginnings – in fact, album number six (his first for the terrific Bella Union label) boasts a roll call of contributors longer than a Neil Young guitar solo. The list of 18 musicians reads partially like a who's who of modern day Americana – Giant Sand frontman Howe Gelb, Bright Eyes' Mike Mogis, ex-Cardinal Jon Graboff and Dr Dog's Tobey Leaman all lent a hand, as did Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley. PJ Harvey producer John Parish was one of eight who helped engineer the sessions.
The album's sequencing is a bit of a puzzle: after beginning with the hushed acoustic strum of Clean Slate, a beautiful tribute to Big Star's Alex Chilton, Ward foists a clutch of four songs upon us with a relentlessly rollicking tempo. Of those, Primitive Girl is a concisely clipped, downright catchy pop song. The first of two consecutive covers – Daniel Johnston's Sweetheart, with Zooey guesting – is listenable but lyrically trite and a bit corny. Much better is a radical re-rendering of I Get Ideas, best known through slow jazz and swing versions in the 1950s by Louis Armstrong and crooner Tony Martin. Joined on vocal duties by Susan Sanchez, Ward steps on the accelerator, cuts loose on his electric guitar and turns the song into an exhilarating rock'n'roll monster of the sort Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly would treasure.
Then comes an abrupt lurch back into dreamy lullaby territory on The First Time I Ran Away, a vibe broadly adhered to for the remainder. Things take a turn for the darker lyrically on the delicately finger-picked There's A Key as he sings of "losing my marbles one marble at a time". Later, he's off "conquering an ocean one wave at a time". Strings and synths provide pretty wallpaper to that rich, honeyed drawl on the deeply affecting Crawl After You, which includes a cryptic suggestion that he was "raised by a tribe of Vegas cowboys, who claim I was born from a union of dust and wind".
Ward has a somewhat enigmatic public persona, tending to reveal fairly little in interviews. In the PR blurb accompanying its release, he talks of undergoing "a process of stripping away my security blanket, which is the same four walls I always record in". His work seems custom-built to appeal to those seeking comfort and solace during troubled times, to those who feel they don't quite fit in and to the lovelorn who have found their hearts, like Ward's on the delicious outgoing coda Pure Joy, in "a rut, a recession". As the song's title suggests, the album bows out on a redemptive note:
"Thought I was falling fast to the bottom of the ocean /And just my luck my hands were all chained up behind my back / But now I'm coming up for air / I see my angel on the sand / She's running out to meet me / To save me again"
It's not clear what he had in mind when knocking together the running order, but the lack of cohesion means that, as a start-to-finish listen, A Wasteland Companion is less than the sum of its parts. Watching some of his virtuoso live performances also leaves a nagging sense that Ward might be wiser to consider dropping some of the adornments on his next record. That said, he continues to be masterful at funnelling exquisite new wine into dusty old bottles, and there's plenty of stellar material here to enhance an already impressive pedigree. He has already won some new fans thanks to March's support slot on Feist's tour, and hopefully A Wasteland Companion will generate more exposure for this supremely talented fellow.
