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M. WARD IS


Posted by Hartley On Jan 26, 2009

He wrote this song just to remember the endless summer in your life....

So this is a really gorgeous video. Edited by Ward himself for the title track off his stellar new album, Hold Time (Merge), the gauzy black and white old tram (?) footage is the perfect companion to the song's moody snail-paced tempo. It looks cool, yes? But the 64 million dollar question s why the songs lyrics are intermittently subtitled into the video karaoke style. Is this thing supposed to be like a karaoke video? And a cruel spirited one at that, what with only giving you like half the words. Also, can you imagine someone actually doing karaoke to this song? What a buzzkill. Beautiful track - but more to appreciate depressed and alone, as opposed to poorly sung in front of a room full of drunken people. Just sayin'.

In other news, M. Ward's new one has GORGEOUS album art, see!:

BRM blog image

You can never go wrong with the Helvetica font apparently. Especially though, if you've made the single best album of a career already riddled with highlights. M. Ward is kind of shockingly consistent. Just last year, he made an incredible record with Zooey Deschanel that managed to top plenty of Best of lists, and now he's back with yet another (not just good) but truly outstanding record. Hold Time (Merge) is definitely the man's closest bid for a real, as they say in the "music industry", "breakthrough." This may just be a euphemistic way of saying it's not only his most uptempo record (in spite of the above video), but it's also his most diverse. "Never Had Anybody Like You" has Gary Glitter, NBA-bleacher friendly drums, while "To Save Me" sounds incredibley modern especially for a dyed in the wool folkie like Ward - perhaps this is because the track features ex-Grandaddy dudeman, Jason Lytle. Another showstopper, is Ward's duet with Lucinda Williams on a cover of Neil Young's "Oh Lonesome Me." All in all, this baby may not be as trendy-sounding as the Animal Collective record, but realistically if too many more albums come out that sound as good as either one of these these it will be a very, very killer year in music.

Dig on "Never Had Anybody Like You" off Hold Time out on Merge 2/17:

 

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