Josh Ritter – Fever Breaks
Pytheas/Thirty Tigers – 26 April 2019
For his tenth studio album, Josh Ritter has enlisted Jason Isbell on production duties, as well as both he and his band, the 400 Unit as his backing musicians and, while none of his albums have been remotely subpar, this easily ranks among his very best, not to mention his most political.
It opens with the ringing guitars and steady drumbeat of Ground Don’t Want Me, a cowboy murder ballad of sorts, in which, I’m assuming, the narrator laments how he’s been shut out of being laid to rest and salvation (“I wanna lay down in a field of bone/But an angel guards the garden”) after taking revenge and killing those responsible for his mother’s death – or, on the other hand, the dark suggestion that he knifed her too, those he’s killed now at rest while he remains a body without a soul.
A rumbling bluesy groove that shares a musical kinship with Springsteen’s Cover Me drives Old Black Magic, another number that explores inner demons (“I tried to be a good man/Something changes in the wind”) where the singer’s guardian angel is, in fact, a crow as the fire inside starts rolling in (“I know the way it goes down/It’s all in my head/I feel it rising/From its unmarked bed”). There, the singer shares a kinship with a troubled soul partner and that same notion of being drawn to another is also present in the nimbly fingerpicked, steel and piano accompanied On The Water (“I’m drawn to you., honey, like the sea to the fisherman’s daughter”), although this time the attraction is more positive (“I’ll be around it don’t matter what the others offer”), reaching out a helping hand when “you’re in-between nothing but thin air and the unknown”, although the object of affection has to make the choice.
The heart’s constancy provides the lifeblood to the reflective Dylanesque old flame ballad I Still Love You (Now and Then), even though both have gone down separate paths and they’re both with another, those old feelings still linger.
If Dylan’s the touchstone there, then the near six-minute simple fingerpicked The Torch Committee unabashedly channels Cohen in its form and delivery, the song a response to the McCarthyesque climate of persecution, paranoia and fear abroad in today’s America with its images of testifying to a committee, naming names, making deals and having to “pledge that you have always been a patriot and a citizen” while “brothers, fathers, sons and wives, the ones with whom you’ve shared your life” are “disappeared by dark of night.”
Traditional folk is the bedrock of Silverblade with its familiar tale of a girl taking bloody revenge after being done wrong by some wealthy lord and his false promises, before a more bluegrassy note is struck on the uptempo shuffling Dylanish protest All Some Kind of Dream, another song that turns the lens on the dark days of contemporary America as he sings of refugees seeking sanctuary, of children in a holding pen, bitterly noting “there was a time we took them in/Or was it all some kind of dream”, when “we used to fight for what we knew was right.”
Losing Battles, from whence the album title derives, is the most muscular, heaviest number, calling Neil Young and the guitar sounds of Crazy Horse to mind, striking another pessimistic note in “sometimes the righteous win/Most times it’s a losing battle” because “it’s always been in my nature/To be the beast”, but ultimately closing with the hope of being able “to mend my ways” through the support of a helping hand.
The idea of losing track of who we are or were, of losing innocence, fuels A New Man (“who can’t remember how his blood would shake in boyhood to the rhythm of the wheat fields in the wind”), of no longer hearing the bells or not knowing or caring for whom they toll. As the song builds, he sings of the need to bring about change without ourselves and the nation, to begin again and find “in every stranger’s face a place of welcome” and to refuse to “walk among the dead a moment longer.”
It ends with the simple acoustic fingerpicking and sonorous electric notes of Blazing Highway Home leaving a prayer of hope for better days ahead and a reminder of solidarity and support (“we will be here watching you though you may feel alone”) and that “may the angel sing you country songs/Your mama sang you back when days were long/More beautiful than anything you’ve known.” Or maybe just play this album. This is the kind of album people have been waiting for from Springsteen in response to Trump’s America. Ritter has saved him the time.
Fever Breaks is out on 26 April. Order via Amazon
Photo Credit: Laura Wilson
