On Hold Time, his sixth studio album, Portland, Oregon Indie-rocker M. Ward sounds like a man who is thinking things through, trying to make sense of the proverbial “I’ve been a few places.” On the opener, “For Beginnings, he sings, “When you’re absolute beginners/ It’s a panoramic view,” and from there he’s off to get a closer look at things, from the underground of New York City, to next stop Shangri-La. Faith is on his mind; in “Epistemology” he reveals, “I learned how to hold on from a book of old Psalms”, as is confinement (“Jailbird”), and love (“One Hundred Million Years”, “Hold Time”). He pairs with She & Him co-contributor, Zooey Deschanel on the album’s first single, the toe-tapper “Never Had Nobody Like You” and when he sings, “I trusted liars and thieves in my madness/Honey, I was wasting away in the room/But now that I been through that hell I got a story to tell,” you’ve invested yourself in whatever he’s got to say. Ward’s trademark is that his voice hovers somewhere between a dusty country road and an easy-to-be-a-dreamer star-filled sky summer night, and it’s the perfect compliment to his guitar, which he wields like someone who grew up idolizing George Harrison. The true beauty of both, his voice and his guitar, is the restraint; less sounds just about right pretty much all the time. Hold Time is a fitting title; it’s an homage, or a time capsule of sorts—beyond the obvious parallels of Ward’s breath-of-fresh-air revival of Buddy Holly’s “Rave On”, he and Lucinda Williams beautiful take on the country standard, “Oh Lonesome Blues”, or the Johnny Cash train track chug of “Fisher of Men”—open it and you hear the dusty reminders of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson-like production from time forgotten, when songs could be both worldly colossal and at the same time your closet chum; someone whose hand you just don’t want to let go of because if you do you risk never getting that moment back. Hold Time perhaps isn’t as good as its predecessor, the stalwart 2006 release Post War, but it further solidifies him as the M. Ward of his generation, the same way Neil Young and Joni Mitchell were the Neil Young and Joni Mitchell of theirs; voices worth listening to because hearing them felt so good.