It makes sense that there is an M. Ward record called A Wasteland Companion. The man's songs-- so deeply focused on God and faith and love and time and unspooling so steadily and reliably for more than a decade now-- can be especially useful when life feels bleak, lonely, or reduced to an irradiated landscape of smoldering ash-piles. What does not seem quite right is that this particular album is the one that has been given that particular name. Of all Ward's efforts, the one now called A Wasteland Companion actually seems the least interested in offering any kind of existential salve, largely too preoccupied with making sense of its own self to forge any bridges outward.
As always, these new songs sound immaculate. Divorced from all sense of the English language, listening to M. Ward is nowadays perhaps more deeply pleasurable than it ever has been, with glistening strings and big slabs of piano occupying more and more of the terrain once almost entirely populated by his nimble fingered guitar, trashcan percussion, and creaky room noises. Ward is almost more song stylist than a producer or arranger, taking bits and pieces from his attic stash of well cared-for musical props (blues, countrypolitan, AM pop) and situating them all just so within two to four minutes of sturdy square walls. And he generally knows, too, when to fully pare back to just his voice and a guitar (sometimes recorded so closely, in such fine fidelity, that the sound of his finger-flesh scraping the strings is audible, or at least easily imagined). Opener "Clean Slate" (with its dedication "to Alex [Chilton] and El Goodo") and the too-brief title track are enough to make you think maybe he doesn't need much else.
A couple of tracks tread further into the unusually giddy territory of "Never Had Nobody Like You" from his 2009 release Hold Time, an original that sniped a riff from Steely Dan and, with a glittery, glam-rock smear, marked one of the more overtly poppy moments in Ward's catalog. "Sweetheart", approximately the 97th Daniel Johnston cover Ward has committed to tape, slides in after the urgently surreal "Me and My Shadow", shattering the crushing gloom with randy drums and piano ribbons, jumpy handclap breaks, and a slight clutch of reverb-laden Zooey Deschanel cooing the refrain. (There's something to be said about Ward's attraction to both Johnston and Deschanel as lyricists-- about the overlapping tendencies of their generally earnest, sweetly clunky lines and their respective brands of wide-eyed wonder, which come from such different places but which are regularly funneled through Ward into songs often deeply charming and occasionally quite moving.) After "Sweetheart" comes a cover of old tango standard "I Get Ideas", on which Ward splits the difference between Peggy Lee and Louis Armstrong's respective takes by throwing in some flailing drums, a grimy rockabilly guitar break, and backing vocals from Rachel Cox of Brooklyn folk-rock resuscitators Oakley Hall. Her delivery is distant and just biting enough to easily imagine her as the object of said ideas, sweetly playing along but rolling her eyes when Ward scampers off to collect their one soda/two straws at the sock-hop concession stand.
That Wasteland's two covers, both chipper dalliances in puppy love, are slotted back-to-back so early on is one of a few oddities of sequencing and arc that plague the record. Twinkling lead single "Primitive Girl", a good-natured but head-scratching ode to some manic pixie dream girl just doing her own entirely unspecified thing ("She don't like to boast/ From her natural head, to her natural toes"), is stitched together with a trembling, seemingly unrelated coda about staring down disaster; a meandering outro is pinned onto the waif of a title track, too, a hovering string patch drawn out over a distant sample of crowd noise. That leads into the weird, blighted moment that is "Watch the Show", on which Ward sings as a disgruntled, lower-rung TV station employee, one Billy R. Boroughs (no relation to William S.), who hijacks himself some airtime to dole out a mess of ominously non-specific threats. Buroughs doesn't seem to have a beef with the one percent or the soul-crushing mechanizations of the mainstream media or anyone, really, despite originating in a cultural moment that would most certainly sympathize if he did. He just kinda hates his job and doesn't really like how his life's turned out. "Tomorrow on your way into work, who'll be wearing the emperor's clothes?" he leers, voice dripping with all the portent of a sophomore film-studies major who just watched Network for the first time. The overblown self-importance is abetted by rubbery layers of acoustic and electric guitar and hollow, militaristic drums (delivered by Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley, though you'd hardly know).
The three songs that come next each mine bungled connections-- a continental divide, a desperate introduction, a wild goose flown-- and are lovely enough, contemplative, and well-considered. "Crawl After You" is especially fine, a restrained piano lope that blooms into dizzying waltz and gets spiked with an electric-guitar scorch at just the last second. But then "Pure Joy", the album closer, sounds exhausted, like a 5K jogger dragging himself to the finish line, relishing the moment of collapse before bare knees scrape the blacktop: "Ain't no other way to say just what this feeling is/ Pure joy, pure joy, pure joy," Ward sighs away the album's final lines. On his previous releases, graceful final tracks have been named "Outro" and "Afterword"; this one might as well be called "Eh, I Give Up (Maybe I Should've Just Made an EP)".
Thinking about A Wasteland Companion and its title, the idea of desert-island discs comes to mind. Music fans still bat around this hypothetical to distract from the terrifying fact that if you were ever really marooned-- on an island, in a fallout shelter, wherever-- you wouldn't have any say in who or what you're stuck with, let alone the soundtrack of all your lonely days to come. What you'd really have would be some slapdash amalgam of humanity, assembled by chance and nothing more, the best and worst parts of your fellow survivors all immediately and painfully present, immutable and magnified by proximity and lack of all other options. So maybe the name is perfect after all.
