“A Lenticular Slap” really is lenticular, transmuting from a riverine arpeggio, notes glittering and cascading, to suddenly being bent and refracted through a lense of Waitsian, Beefheartian blues addle, jerky as a skeleton dance, all shoulders and knees, before wheeling you back into a (slightly) smoother jazz-folk, tripping forward a la Lorca, beautiful, restless, always seeking new crannies to explore and get musical tendrils into. Elsewhere there’s talk of dreams being projected on national monuments, extending hands to all probable possibilities lyrically, and musically, Ryley operates in a set of dimensions which we can peer into investigate but never wholly grasp – which I’m sure is entirely intentional. Strings delight and chorus and Ryley exclaims: “I’m so fried / Brain dizzy inside / Fuck me, I’m alive,” seemingly in both senses of the word wonderment.
“Rang Dizzy” was the first single drop a little bit back, and maybe we’re in more familiar Ryley country, baroque and tricksy and melodious but dropping back on the tide towards the innovative pastoralism, The Left Banke swinging out in a wider folk vantage.
It proper early-Seventies out in the instrumental breaks, which almost demand UV-respondent cloaks. At moments the song seems to flutter its lashes more at the territory of Buckley junior, rather than that of Buckley senior oblique and impressionistic lyricism seeps into your brain and tells a story beyond the strictly literal.
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And then he sings, his voice a rich, cracked anchor, and you know everything is gonna be ok. “Striking Down Your Big Premiere” is a grand entrée, chords ringing clear and crisp over thundering toms, proggy lead odysseys taking flight and retreating again, just about staying within the prog event horizon of being in service the song. Let’ go see how it measures up against astral-folk classics such as Primrose Green and Golden Songs That Have Been Sung. Yep, there’s tricky time signatures at play, too. Ryley calls this new one his “prog record” and he’s kinda joking – but remember, he actually does love Genesis, recently espousing the virtues of 1980 album Duke on Twitter.Īlthough the guitar is always front and centre, as it should be on a RW album, there’s also beauteous string arrangements from Douglas Jenkinsm of the Portland Cello Project. I mean, have you witnessed him live? He’s truly transcendent, the gentlest hand on the tiller, knowing exactly when and what’s needed to send a song skyward in the moment. His work just keeps getting more labyrinthine, deeper, free-thinking ideas allowed to tumble forth into the rich stew of sound and with the line-up he has behind him. The album also features the lovely Bill MacKay, whose got an album out on Drag City with Nathan Bowles soon himself, and with whom Ryley’s made a gorgeous brace of long-playing instrumental essays, including 2017’s Spiderbeetlebee drummer Ryan Jewell who, have you seen him laying it out out live? Wow, is back at the drums, and Andrew Scott Young is in on bass. “The pop element is never too far from the surface, even when shit gets weird,” we’re assured. The result is a rich, immersive, complex, off-the-cuff, playful Ryley half-jokingly calls it his “prog record” – but if you follow him on Twitter, you’ll know he has a deep and abiding love for Genesis’ Duke and other such dusty treasures. “I told him to take the mixes and have at it,” Ryley says. Though of course if you bring John on board for a record, he’s gonna get involved beyond that. Ryley grew up in the Windy City and it was to one of the prime movers of that turn-of-the-century scene, John McEntire, that Ryley turned for the making of Course In Fable the Tortoise and The Sea & Cake man being the perfect foil behind the faders. It sounds like a really strong catalogue of work just keeps getting stronger. On this new set the brilliantly freewheelin’ guitar style he has finds a path between the twin towers of Sam Prekop and an almost baroque soft-rock thang, melodically complex, jazz-inflected, diaristic and wholly true to the Ryley aesthetic.Īlthough he’s moved to New York, the new album is wholly Chicago in spirit, with that jazz-folk-prog-postrock inventiveness twining. He’s set to release his new solo album, among a complex catalogue of other releases and brilliant two-handed musical conversations with people like Charles Rumback, Bill MacKay, Daniel Bachman and Kikagayu Moyo – fellow travellers out in the interesting and experimental edges of Americana, psych-folk, and folk.
TROUBADOUR genius touched by the hand of the Tim Buckley, collaborator on some very fine albums, sole architect of yet other records that fall very much in that same category, and one of the funniest and most candid tweeters in music: Ryley Walker is all of these.
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