MUSIC REVIEW: M. WARD - 'HOLD TIME'
A Simple Comfort of Simple Times, Simple Joys, and Simple Pleasures
(Merge Records) The air is strange these days. It hangs heavy on the shoulders with all the burdens of war, economic confusion, and the ominous fears of homelessness, terror, and a planet spinning too hot for its own good. Yet, at the same time, it’s moving on a sudden, swift, and hopeful breeze of a new beginning, a new birth, “…a panoramic view from her majesty Mount Zion…"
Ah…this is all too much for a man to gather in his thoughts on a lonely Friday evening just before he frequents the local watering hole to cap off another week of barely holding his nose above the rising waters of impending unemployment. But, apparently, it’s not too much for a man to capture with a few good tunes set to finger-picking an old guitar, and that is exactly what M. Ward has done with his latest record, Hold Time, which is set to be released February 17th on Merge Records.
I’ve lived my whole life with the horrible curse of being born nearly 30 years after my time, and I’d like to believe that Mr. Matt Ward can sympathize with my plight. With the chugging acoustic train engine that rolls out the opening track, “For Beginners (AKA Mt. Zion),” Hold Time is a harkening back to that day when the sounds of The Crickets, The Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley, and Roy Orbison crackled on AM radios in barber shops, dive bars, juke joints, and off the checkered linoleum diner floors, where rock and roll saved this nation’s body and soul from the ball and chain of post-war rigidity. However, as low as Hold Time bows in reverence to the first pioneers of the rock and roll frontier, M. Ward’s latest accomplishment imparts a social/emotional/relational conscience that straddles that line between the clear summer night naiveté of a blissful adolescence and the gathering thunderclouds of maturity’s harsh inevitabilities in an immediately relevant manner. No easy task for a songwriter/musician (or any other sort of artist). No easy task at all, especially in this day and age.
Hold Time is an optimistic album. It’s got a rhythm to dance to, no question, but this optimism is not blind. “For Beginners (AKA Mt. Zion)” and the grittier, rockabilly distortions and stomping rhythms of “Never Had Anybody Like You” (with the lovely Zooey Deschanel offering backup vocals reminiscent of their collaborative side-project, She & Him) do well to toss hot coals in the firebox and get the wheels rolling down the track. The pace of the album is then set and balanced perfectly by the catchy chorus of “Jailbird,” an oddly dark yet up-tempo ballad (more or less) telling of a lonely, love-stricken soul locked in a cage, wondering “Who’s gonna here my ‘help me, help me’ now?” -- the last gasps (I assume) before his impending execution.
If we’re being held down by the chains of love, the title track marks that point when the initial adrenaline rush of new love has pushed all the endorphins up into your brain and you float through the air, light-headed, weightless, and free, straining to “hold time” still to the accompaniment of cellos, violins, and a distant piano keeping time with soft brushstrokes on a high hat. It is only appropriate, then (or perhaps a stroke of a certain sort of genius), that at the onset of this romantic headrush, M. Ward, rejoins Deschanel to Buddy Holly’s classic “Rave On,” the clarion call for generations of foggy-windowed parked cars under starry nights to “rave on this crazy feeling…I know you’ve got me reeling.”
As close as romance is bound to love, so also love is bound to the human need for rescue to be delivered from the limitations or boundaries of ourselves. Ward uses the more electronic synth-driven “To Save Me” as his transition into the second half of the album, which marks a deeper, more introspective exploration of the human musical condition.
Ward ventures courageously down the churning river waters of “One Hundred Million Years,” a song whose lyrics and acoustic arrangement flow with all the rhythmic harmony of a spinning paddlewheel in the Mississippi. “Stars of Leo” once again reunites the She & Him duo of Ward and Deschanel, and then he also welcomes Lucinda Williams, who offers the humbled, world-weary but not broken heart of a woman to beat true to the slide guitars in Don Gibson’s classic “Oh Lonesome Me,” arguably the strongest emotional offering in Hold Time.
“Fisher of Men” describes a Christ figure to chick-a-boom guitars and a vintage country gospel melody. Now I will not claim any awareness at all of Ward’s idea of religious matters here, but setting any prospects of satire aside, I’m led to wonder if Ward lifted this one from a wrinkled-up, tossed-out piece of paper he found at the bottom of a wastebasket in the backroom of Sun Studios, a scribbled remnant of that seminal point where hillbilly, blues, country, and gospel collided, and rock and roll breathed its first breaths.
As I’ve said, all this is too much for me at this point in time, or any other time for that matter. But Ward digresses and maintains a healthy perspective with “Epistemology,” the autobiographical reminder to himself and all of us: “I learned how to keep my head/from something that Paul said/about keepin’ the fruit and spirit from the chorus down to the hook.” With all hopes that we have, in fact, kept our heads thus far, Ward sets us down easy in the rough times with his cuffed acoustic trademark in “Blake’s View,” promising that “death is just a door/you’ll be reunited on the other side.” And this “other side” is described in the words of “Shangri-La,” which Ward softly sings to the chugging train engine strumming by, which we first set out on this journey in “For Beginners (AKA Mt. Zion)."
Hold Time is nostalgic, no question -- a piece of work from a man whose own soul may very well be caught forever in a bygone era that suddenly burst forth in the middle of last century with all the fiery brilliance of a blazing Roman candle and was all but blown away with the last remaining ashes of a tragic plane crash in Clear Lake, Iowa. Yet Ward’s ambition here is not to be imprisoned in or by the past, but to let the past set us free -- to rekindle the glow of the fire that came before us and let it shine forth a light on the paths we’ve yet to go.
Ah…this is much too much for a man to gather. But, mind you, Hold Time does not listen as heavy as perhaps my review here may have led you to believe. In Hold Time, Ward’s words and music easily drift in and out and between the uncertainty and the fear and hope and the redemption carried by the winds nowadays. There’s a comfort there -- a simple comfort of simple times, simple joys, and simple pleasures.
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