Josh Ritter sure don't got the blues. Perhaps it's a side effect of employing a bassist who could have been the original model for the joke-shop glasses/comedy nose/moustache combination, but Idaho's favourite alt-folk poet is one big grin – from organ-drenched opener Southern Pacifica to the pirate-shanty finale of To the Dogs or Whoever. He bounces like a frisky jackrabbit during Lillian, Egypt; leads a chorus of wolf howls during Wolves; and jokes with the lighting technician about making the crypt-like venue feel "more sarcophagal". Despite a tumultuous few years of divorce and hospital stays – Josh almost died from over-exercise last year – Ritter is no dour and damaged folk survivor. Here's a guy whose reflective seventh album, The Beast in Its Tracks, features a divorce song titled Hopeful and who, even in dark times, re-launched a blog called The Book of Jubilance.
His cheerfulness is infectious – particularly when he's wishing "joy to the many" on canyon rocker Joy to You Baby – but his inspirations are transparent. Ostensibly, Ritter links the trad-folk and country of Dylan and Van Morrison with the rarefied lilts and quivers of Bright Eyes and Sufjan Stevens, but his wider references can border on pastiche. Hopeful's folk-rock recreation of The Winner Takes It All contains tongue-twister verses resembling Phil Lynott chattering through the Boys Are Back in Town. Evil Eye shows early symptoms of the Four Tops' Reach Out (I'll Be There). And blue-collar brooder Rumors begins like the house band in a bar on the edge of town, and ends with the sort of ominous prog piano segment rarely heard since Supertramp's Crime of the Century.
Ritter revels in his rootsier indulgences, kicking up hoedown dust-storms and throwing himself lustily into Mississippi John Hurt's American-gothic Folk Bloodbath, with its psycho cowboys and hanging judges. But when the pace slows, the grin falters and his poetry of surrealist ragtime romance (The Curse) and apocalyptic love in a third-world-war bomb shelter (The Temptation of Adam) unravels, he becomes an artist all his own.
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