In 2009, folk singer-songwriter and author Josh Ritter married musician Dawn Landes. By 2011, the couple had split. Taking hold of a shattered life, Ritter’s seventh album is allegedly the result of a burst in creativity during a period of intense pain, sleepless nights, and life reevaluation. The Beast In Its Tracks begins softly, in an airy lo-fi chamber where his lonesome voice reverberates, as he briefly recalls encountering a woman who bore his late love’s eyes and smile, ending his short, sad ditty with: “We danced / And I regret that she asked me to / ‘Cause she didn’t have your arms.”
Although musically The
Beast In Its Tracks is not a tremendous departure from Ritter’s previous
work, its lyrical directness is. Forsaking the poetic puzzles and encrypted
symbolism of his more demanding albums, Ritter largely avoids his usual
preoccupations. There are no steamboats or silent film stars, no Midwestern
towns or ghosts from American folklore. His use of Christian and apocalyptic imagery
is less complex and pointed, his targets more earthly and immediate. The Beast In Its Tracks is an album of
love lost and the suffering that comes with it, a personally administered
exorcism with modest artistic ambitions.
For a breakup record, the album admirably avoids whininess
or overt sentimentality. As a soundtrack to emotional recovery, it excels, bouncing
between bitterness and forgiveness, sorrow and acceptance. Ritter’s ornate
wordplay and caustic cleverness, however, is greatly missed. The Beast In Its Tracks is too
singularly focused to take on the sum of human history as its predecessors
courageously tried to. The feelings it burrows into though are, in their own humbly
narrow way, deep enough.
Ritter spends much of his pining, pensive album striving to
convince himself he has found a better love to replace what has been torn from
him. Yet his praise of this other woman is qualified by observations that “she
only looks like you in a certain kind of light / when she holds her head just
right” and that he merely wants to “hold her” and “don’t need to read her mind.”
By the record’s close, he remains obsessed with his failure, if not somewhat
reconciled to what has been, wishing happiness for both his ex-wife and
himself. “There’s pain in whatever we stumble upon,” he confesses on “Joy to
You Baby.” “If I never had met you / You couldn’t have gone / But then I couldn’t
have met you / We couldn’t have been / I guess it all adds up / To joy in the
end.”
While The Beast In Its
Tracks is at times a somber listen, the record itself adds up to a certain
strained joy. “Nightmares” are soothed by a “New Lover.” The mournful, intimate
“Appleblossom Rag,” featuring what appears to be a home audio recording of a
conversation between Ritter and Landes, is followed by the peppiness of “Bonfire”
and “In Your Arms Awhile.” Though Ritter cannot abandon his ex-wife’s memory, the album
itself serving as testament, he does reach for wholeness and seems to be
limping on his way to a better place. Hopefully the simple, relatable record he
has created is of help to him and to sore-hearted listeners who live out parallel
tales of loss and perseverance.
Grade: B+
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