So Runs The World Away

He's not the only one channeling the greats, but he does it better than almost anyone else today.

Wordy troubadour's sixth and finest effort. [Sept. 2010, p. 118]

The result is this quite sensational new album that not only purges the darkness, but marks the finest music he has made.

The 'New Springsteen' comes of age.

Another New World constitutes the elegiac and unsettling thesis of Josh Ritter's potent new album.

Stirring stuff, and food for thought, too.

By shirking an introspective approach, he has succeeded brilliantly in wending a line between intricacy and intimacy. The output is a genuinely majestic creation, brimming with a richness of substance to both enthral and devastate.

Ritter's wordplay can be dense, but his warm, inviting voice makes it a pleasure to unravel.

Equally steeped in Southern and Midwest Gothic Americana, the son of a pair of neuroscientists has crafted his most unique collection of songs to date, borrowing characters from mythology, literature, and world history and letting them run wild in the increasingly adventurous, neo-traditional folk style that his become his forte over the last decade.

Ritter has taken his time delivering album number five after stepping back from a period of writer's block. So Runs The World Away suggests every artist should have such problems, Ritter's most freewheeling album flitting between waltzes with Egyptian pharaohs to the tongue-in-cheek murder ballad Folk Bloodbath. [Sep 2010, p.92]

It's a work of craft from a continually rewarding, continually American, singer-songwriter.

So Runs The World Away is vivid, artful, expressive and more besides. [Sep 2010, p.100]

It is a monumental album in everything from the scope of its subject matter to its grand instrumentation and production.

There are ten other very fine songs here, this album shows Ritter developing continually, and there's potential for greatness, in time.

The good thing is that for any misstep here, there's a success that overshadows it. But for those of us waiting for him to really knock another out of the park the way he did on The Animal Years, it might be a let down to realize So Runs the World Away isn't that.