It sometimes must feel that once you get to a certain stage in your career there can’t be many more milestones to reach, but none of these boundaries seem to be apparent to M. Ward.
Migration Stories is his tenth album since the turn of the millennium, but along the way he’s found time to appear as She & Him with Zooey Deschanel (six more) and become a member of Monsters Of Folk with, amongst others, Conor Oberst and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, a project that managed just the one long player which emerged in 2009.
This time, working with various Arcade Fire alumni, the singer has decided to go pretty much off the reservation, producing what he’s described as, ‘eleven largely instrumental ballads – a sci-fi fast forward to a more silent night many generations from here to a maybe-era where movement is free again’.
Free movement is something we’d all like again, but Ward is no prophet (thankfully). What arrives instead is music that’s warm and immersive but rarely straightforward, a fuzzy intermezzo in which the likes of Independent Man and Coyote Mary’s Travelling Show present themselves as wispy travelogues, the latter a broken, affectionate country sketch with a dash of the Grand Ole Opry woven in.
This is folk, but not particularly as we know it: opener Migration Of Souls has a campfire element to it, but then a cosmic otherness which points to inspiration from the stars overhead. Ward has said he’s taken these stories from newspapers and other found content, as well as family members, but the superficial homeliness of Heaven’s Nail And Hammer makes a case that it could almost soundtrack some Lynchian fetish movie, the simplicity as subliminally dark as mom’s bad apple pie.
Is something wrong here then? Where are the souls who populate these stories going and why? The answers are not immediately obvious. Ward, in fairness, seems happy to occupy the half-light and on occasion, as on the naked sounding Chamber Music, the lack of polish makes for some beautiful moments, but a couple of interludes – Stevens’ Snow Man and the closer Rio Drone – seem almost intentionally to do not much except occupy time.
Predictably however, the most notable moments are the ones which jar against the overall haze. Unreal City is one of them, an isolated but welcome tilt at the 21st century which eloquently makes the case for Ward being perfectly able to execute pop, while back in this time bubble Along The Santa Fe Trail is his functional and charming treatment of a thirties standard once made popular by the ever missing Glenn Miller.
After ten albums, who’s still counting? M. Ward may well go on to make ten more, and seems to show little desire that he needs to be embraced more than artists with no other expectations to meet than his own.
Migration Stories offers a glimpse of this sepia dimension, but whilst the goings on are never predictable, they rarely thrill.
