"Golden Age of Radio" doesn't knock your socks off, but sometimes it's nicer to have your socks left cozily alone. It demands attention not for its musical invention but for its development and combination of familiar, comfortably worn techniques. The comparisons to Neil Young and Nick Drake that Ritter has accumulated are certainly apt, but it would be limiting to hail him as the "next" Young or Drake. Ritter shares Neil Young's talent to sing undeniably sappy lyrics without fumbling, but his songs are less shadowy and more fluid than Young's. The elements of Ritter's "You've Got the Moon" sounds enough like Drake's sliding fingerwork and velveteen voice to have made critics call him a reincarnate, but "Golden Age of Radio" as a whole demonstrates that Ritter can operate in more dimensions than Drake did.
This ability to move among musical styles is one of the album's greatest virtues. As one track spins into the next, there are eyebrow-raising shifts in sound while themes of love and quiet longing remain constant. This sophisticated construction is also apparent within the tracks, yet they somehow manage to deny pretension. "Lawrence, KS" includes a masterly union of a southern beat and Irish bagpipes; but it also conjures up the down-to-earth image of a couple in rumpled Levi's at some firelit summer gathering near the cornfields, dancing slowly with hips together, bottles of Bud pressed against one another's back.
Ritter grew up fittingly in a small town in Idaho, and much of his material is based on his rural adolescence. "Me and Jiggs" is a carefree tale about trying to get a prom date by painting a girl's name on the local water tower. Snippets of imagery like "And I keep me in a vacant lot/ In the ivy and forget-me-nots/ Hoping you will come and untangle me one of these days" and "Pull your dress up to your knees/ Out in the fields we'll go walking" reveal Ritter's tendency to use the fertile panorama of country life to summon emotion.
Songs about loneliness and uncertainty often encourage self-pity, but Ritter has the talent to make his listener feel glad and that he is part of the noble class of people who don't know where they are going. In "Leaving," his nonchalant lyrics "Leaving, leaving, leaving but I don't know where" are accompanied by a thoughtful acoustic plucking that reassures the wistful listener that beauty can be found wherever the road is leading. The repeated emphasis of place in Ritter's songs is paradoxical in that he implies movement while his feet remain planted in the dust of the Midwest. No matter how much Ritter moves among musical genres, he always evokes a pleasing familiarity that makes the listener imagine that it's something he's heard before and, while trying to place it, realizes that it's not a song he knows but one he's felt it before.
Since the release of "Golden Age of Radio," Ritter's promotion tour has been selling out modest theaters in both Ireland and the United States. Ritter's experience in and around Dublin was quick to make its hearty mark on his performances. At the Iron Horse in Northampton on Saturday night, the unassuming Ritter chose to teach a happy crowd the chorus of his favorite Irish folk song rather than simply catalog the best tracks of his album. Grinning and unabashedly belting out a boozy tune about a woman's hair hanging over her shoulders, he clearly enjoyed leading his audience into a mirthful lot of sloshing and swaying. But less than 20 minutes later, not one ice cube tinkled as he stepped away from the microphone to coo "Lawrence, KS" into the dark naked air, just as one imagines he first did someplace quiet under the stars-or before a familiar but beautiful sunset.