Josh Ritter is a big picture kind of songwriter. Eschewing the confessional approach along with overtly personal lyrics, his last two albums were less about himself and more about all of America all at once, as though Ritter were reconstructing John Banvard's panoramic trip down the Mississippi. The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter and So Runs the World Away boast ambitious feats of songwriting and composition, yet his craft often undercut rather than underscored his headiest insights. The music sounded too composed: too predetermined, too polite to adequately depict the chaos and sheer weirdness of history. It makes sense that his best work to date isn't an album or a song, but a novel, Bright's Passage, which blended history and fantasy, grand tragedy and life pre- and post-WWI into imaginative literary fiction.
For his seventh full-length, Ritter has abandoned the broad canvas of history. The Beast in Its Tracks is his most ostensibly personal album to date, smaller in scope yet deeper in detail than anything he's done yet. Technically, it's a break-up album, inspired by his divorce from singer-songwriter Dawn Landes. But that label implies messy emotions, lives upended, dishes thrown. Ritter's songs are less about recrimination than recovery. In a letter to fans, he explains that his first songs as an ex-husband were too bitter to record, "full of hatred and self-pity," but time allowed him to gain a new perspective. Rather than recount his precipitous post-split freefall into alcohol and self-loathing, Beast picks up a year or so later, when a new and stable relationship has righted his ship and put him in a more generous mood: "I've got a new lover now," he sings, without boasting. "I hope you've got a lover, too."
That distance has its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it allows Ritter a big-picture perspective: the past as a landscape he has traversed and can see more clearly from this peak. Beast is contemplative and forgiving, a means of burying one relationship to commit to another, and Ritter nicely evokes the excitement and resignation of such a transition. On the other hand, distance is distance, and much of the album is too cool, too levelheaded, too past tense. The spry pace and playful melody of "Nightmares" distract from the horrors described in the lyrics, as such nightmares are safely over. The best moments are the rawest and least guarded, when the pain and regret sound inescapably present tense: when he laughs off his insomnia on "Evil Eye", when he notices similarities between his new lover and his old wife on "A Certain Light", when he finally allows himself to enjoy a bit of happiness on "Joy to You Baby".
The Beast in Its Tracks forgoes the expansive arrangements of Ritter's previous albums in favor of scaled-back arrangements that emphasize a few instruments interacting directly with each other. The songs build patiently, allowing repeating musical themes to mirror persistent lyrical themes. "Hopeful", the album's highlight, opens with a spare acoustic strum, then builds from the ground up: a simple drumbeat, a simple electric guitar pendulum, a one-note piano theme. The effect, however, is surprisingly sophisticated. On that song as well as on "Bonfire", Ritter rushes his delivery, packing the measures with as many words as he can. There's a new, anxious energy to his vocals, which gives the sense that he's trying to get his thoughts out before they grow cold or before he loses his nerve. It's an effective and illuminating technique, revealing just how much divorce and recovery have changed Ritter: He seems to understand that all those mixed emotions can't be so easily fit to music.
