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| Popmatters |
 The fifth LP from neo-folk master craftsman Josh Ritter has been conceived as a voyage of discovery. A shimmering aural and lyrical paean to humanity’s essential questing impulse, So Runs the World Away is also well-attuned to the senses of yearning and of existential absence that motivate that impulse. Populated with wandering mariners, lovesick Egyptian mummies, philosophical chemists, mountaintop seers, grim polar adventurers, and recurring black holes, Ritter’s exquisite collection of songs reflects back at those who once looked forward.Ritter’s chosen themes and tones on So Runs the World Away align it most closely with his career’s early peak, 2006’s sublime The Animal Years. Both records possess a transcendent, celestial scope that dwarfs Ritter’s earlier, straighter folk albums (to say nothing of their stopgap, the rollicking Historical Conquests), but there are vital differences between them, too. The Animal Years saw Ritter searching for the supernatural around every riverbend and in every prairie coulee. When that song-cycle ultimately located the elusive godhead in its shattering climax “Thin Blue Flame”, however, it took the form of “an old man wandering the halls alone”. For all of the album’s overt biblical imagery, Ritter could extract little comfort or meaning from religion, embracing instead a robust humanism (“only a full house is gonna make it through”)....full text |
| Guardian |
| The centrepiece of Josh Ritter's fifth album is a piece of folkloric daring. Under the title of Folk Bloodbath, he gathers together the key figures of American murder ballads into one song and interweaves their stories, using a refrain from Mississippi John Hurt as the glue – and so the lives of Louis Collins, Delia Green, Stagger Lee and Billy Lyons become part of one bloody continuum. It's marvellous: seemingly solemn, but the black humour in this procession of gore is signalled by the title. So marvellous is it that it rather overshadows the rest of the songs, a fate not deserved by the likes of Lanterns, in which a spiralling, pizzicato guitar pattern echoing systems music is gradually subsumed by a rousing rocker, or Another New World, an epic maritime ballad of Ritter's own devising (though it may owe something to Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee). Stirring stuff, and food for thought, too....full text |
| Thehurstreview |
| Josh Ritter’s last album was called Historical Conquests, but maybe he should have saved the title for its follow-up. On the lavishly-titled So Runs the World Away, Ritter does indeed sound a like a conqueror– a world traveler and explorer who’s returned home with stories of all he’s done and seen. The portrait of the mighty ship on the front cover is instructive: This album is a travelogue, a report taken from a long, sometimes harrowing journey into a new world. Exploration is a recurring theme here, not just in the lyrics but in the music. Historical Conquests was a loose, ramshackle album that filtered dusty Americana through Ritter’s pure pop sensibilities; at times it felt almost like an inspired jukebox, spinning one brilliant idea after another. That same mix of wide-eyed curiosity and exploratory instincts are present here as well, but this time Ritter sounds more confident in his own inspiration and craft, less like he’s riding a glorious wave of spontaneity and more like he’s etching out his own masterpiece, a work that’s as bold and as visionary as any album he’s made. And if Historical Conquests was loose and rough around the edged, Runs the World is grand, elegant– imagine the volatile chemistry of the last album crossed with the stately arrangements of The Animal Years and you’re on the right track....full text |
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