M. Ward: Transistor Radio : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

M. Ward is immersed in American roots music, though he plays it with his own eccentric perspective. The thirty-one-year-old Portland, Oregon, troubadour has a blues voice and an acoustic-guitar style close to the blues meditations of John Fahey, handcrafting records with an antique feel. On his fourth album, Transistor Radio, he makes his own melancholy folk ballads fit in with his spectral versions of the Beach Boys' "You Still Believe in Me," J.S. Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" and the Carter Family's "Oh Take Me Back." He's not just another indie-rock singer-songwriter who wishes he had been born a hundred years ago; Ward has imbibed a sense of remorse and cold-eyed mortality from country blues and Appalachian mountain music, and incorporates them into his own decidedly modern songwriting. On Radio, it's a strange but beautiful sound.