(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site. At its best, The World at Night evokes the strangest part of mourning: when your eyes fill with tears but they catch the light, making everything look brighter anyway. That might be The World at Night’s biggest strength. It’s a gutting listen, the kind that looks backwards with unflinching clarity. In interviews, Martin jokes that he can’t sing, but his raspy voice makes for a charmingly suave and despondent narrator in “The Soldier,” the real story of Martin’s grandfather-in-law shipping off to World War II. In Short, WALTR 2 is a smartly efficient solution for all of us who hate iTunes and value drag-and-drop simplicity. This oversimplification appears in flashes, but it’s hard to miss: listing presents a toddler might want in “That’s All I Need,” or conversing with a bird in “Hey Joe.” And yet that side gig might be to blame for the moments in The World at Night where Martin sounds like he’s singing to his kids instead of his peers. Flutes, clarinets, upright bass, baritone sax-his childlike orchestrations in “October” and “First Thing I Remember” somehow avoid crossing into gratingly twee, perhaps because he does write music for children: Cheerios commercial soundtracks, family-friendly solo albums like We’re All Young Together and My Kinda Music, the theme to the Golden Globe-winning animated film Missing Link. Here, Martin’s optimism flourishes in the best arrangements of his career. Instead of dragging listeners through secondhand grief, he invites them to sit beside him at a New York City dive, raise their cocktail glasses in a toast to irrepressibility, and take to the dance floor to celebrate dodging life’s unrelenting punches. No matter the circumstances, Martin refuses to hide the sparkle in his eye. On the title track, Martin gazes at a starry sky: “Gee, is that you whispering to me?/Well I know I shouldn’t believe what I can’t see/But oh my, with each flicker in the sky/A ghost goes ghosting by.” It’s followed by the heartfelt “Little Summer Fly,” about delighting in each day’s fleeting pleasures, and “To the Moon,” an escapist ballad about following foolish dreams. For every song grappling with loss, there are two marveling at life’s uncertainty. The World at Night examines the symbiotic relationship between sorrow and hope.
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