![]() Last October, Ryley went straight to one of the primary architects of the Chicago sound to make the LP. To put it simply: Course In Fable is Walker’s best record yet, full of active imaginationon and endless possibilies. Even though he emerged at first in folkrock troubadour mode, it makes sense that he’s arrived at this point each LP has grown more intricate and assured, his influences disClling into something original and unusual. Walker spent his formaCve years in Chicago, absorbing those heady sounds and finding ways to make them his own. The masterful Course In Fable, the songwriter’s solo effort, draws from the deep well of that city’s ferCle 1990s scene, when bands like Tortoise, The Sea and Cake and Gastr del Sol were reshaping the underground,mixing and matching indie rock, jazz, prog and beyond. ![]() But his latest LP is a Chicago record in spirit. Ryley Walker currently resides in New York City. LABEL: Husky Pants Records CAT NO: HPR008LP BARCODE: 687368313296 Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. Course in Fable bears the ripe fruit of this impulse, cohering into the most impressive of many surprising recent triumphs from an artist who’s faced down oblivion and has emerged more inspired than ever.Ĭatch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. But he soured on being beholden to freak-folk masters and going through the indie-rock golden-boy grinder, so he diversified and started jamming with musicians such as drummer Ryan Jewell, who helped to nudge him down stranger paths. Up through 2016’s Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, Walker was on course to become a 21st-century Tim Buckley, or John Martyn, or Bert Jansch. Walker equips the deity with that most humble of implements, another contrast of the mundane and profound. Shiva is an ascetic Hindu god known as “The Destroyer,” but also as a prodigious creator with world-transforming powers. Who else writes like this? Perversely, Fable’s last song is its catchiest-“Shiva with Dustpan,” a gorgeous orchestral folk tune and a testament to strings arranger and cellist Douglas Jenkins’s delicate touch. I don’t have any big revelations or answers.”Īnother promising new direction emerges on the weird epic “Pond Scum Ocean.” MacKay’s electric guitar skitters in strange directions and in odd modes, then shifts into trance-inducing chimes hinting at both The Twilight Zone theme and John Berberian’s Middle Eastern Rock. It’s all sort of non sequitur, stream-of-consciousness crazy talk. “I write couplets in a journal and stitch them together. ![]() “I’m not a good storyteller,” Walker said in an interview this year. The mantra “Hold on to the loose ends” chanted as a freaky wah-wah guitar exults to the fadeout ranks as a harrowing highlight. It appears to chronicle a drug-induced breakdown, but lines such as “A lenticular slap/To the cross-eyed seeker/The bridge written off the map/News crawl from a goddamn tweaker” don’t telegraph it. Sounding like an homage to the big-vocabulary rock of Slovenly, SST Records’ unsung ’80s heroes, the track writhes with rhythmic switchbacks, unexpected acoustic flourishes, and eccentric vocal phrasing. “A Lenticular Slap” exemplifies Walker’s sloshed-on-words approach. None of the lyrics on Fable lands as bluntly as “I’d rather be dead than to see you cry” from Primrose Green’s “Sweet Satisfaction.” Rather, idiosyncratic details abound and veiled meanings reign. He obliquely poeticizes around his subjects, speaking in riddles as esoteric as they are memorable. These are undoubtedly the album’s most straightforward lyrics.Įlsewhere, it’s clear that Walker has developed into a writer who turns the mundane into the profound. The refrain, “I am wise/I am so fried/Rang dizzy inside/Fuck me, I’m alive,” points to Walker’s amazement at reversing his downward spiral. “We’re all lot lizards parked outside your door,” Walker sings, later concluding, “Always shit-brained when I’m pissed.” Longtime fans may wonder, how did we get to this pomp? But “Rang Dizzy” floats things back to Earth with cello-augmented baroque ’n’ roll. The song soon downshifts into a dulcet burble of folk-rock with an earnest, Sebadoh-esque melodic contour that later splays out into surging proggy climaxes. On opening track “Striking Down Your Big Premiere,” though, you may gasp at the outrageously bold intro that leads into a motif of Keith Emersonian grandiosity, bolstered by rococo, fiery guitar riffing from Bill MacKay. He got happy, but, mercifully, not sappy. ![]() After a failed suicide attempt in 2019, Walker sought help through meds, therapy, sobriety, and he saved himself. As he admitted in an interview conducted in early April, he’d been sabotaging himself for years, saying that “redemption, joy, and gratitude” inform Course in Fable. Another factor in Walker’s artistic resurgence has been resolving his substance abuse problems.
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