M Ward: an album so lovely, I don’t know what to do with it
I’ve written in the past about no longer having space in my life for loud scratchy stuff like the Futureheads.
I realise now that the same is true for extremely lovely quiet stuff, like the new M.Ward album Transistor Radio.
It’s an album so fragile that I’m scared to criticise it in case it breaks.
To really appreciate this, I think you’d have to lock yourself in a dark room and have complete quiet for an hour - focussing on nothing else. And, frankly, the chances of that happening at the moment are considerably less than zero.
You simply can’t play it with anyone else in the room, because you’d have to tell them to shut up. It’s so lovely, you won’t want to miss a bit - and it simply can’t compete with chit-chat.
And if you play it in the car, there’s a fair chance it’ll make you drift off elsewhere and send you veering across the road.
I loved his last album, despite the preposterous title, - in particular the cover of Bowie’s Let’s Dance which managed to turn a piece of glossy 80s nonsense into something really quite twisted and almost painful (yes, I know that doesn’t necessarily sound like an improvement - but you’ll just have to trust me).
I loved it - but I never really got round to listening to it. Well not enough anyway. I sense the same will happen to this.