Ryley walker summer dress5/31/2023 ![]() ![]() Even later, he will joke: “I’m sweating like a stepdad at a sporting event,” before spooling out the night’s climactic workout, Summer Dress. “Working out my daddy issues on the stage, right now!” Later, he will mime the gurning, bear-like stagger of a drunken British teenager he once asked for directions. Then the spell is broken, and Walker grins wickedly. The song, one of the best on the new album, has been an uneasy meander around a romance, markedly more rugged and questing than the recorded version. He strums emphatically, he yips, goes off into another arpeggio, and ends abruptly with a final, violent prang of the guitar. He ebbs, he flows, he sweats, he shakes his hair he looks like he has not had a day of sunshine in years, or any nutrients other than chips. The racket coming off the stage belies the over-polite tang of the jazz-folk tag Walker acquired with his last album Later in the set he’ll cover Tim Hardin’s If I Were a Carpenter. Had Primrose Green been recorded in the era it's influenced by, it could well be among the records Ryley Walker would now be drawing inspiration from high praise indeed.Through those fingers flow many woody and august antecedents: difficult homegrown masters like John Martyn or Bert Jansch, wayward American travellers like John Fahey, more canonical voices like Tim Buckley the jazzy post-rockers of his adopted Chicago. But it's difficult to mind too much, especially as certain moments - such as the odd distress signals emitted by the guitar at the end of "Love Can Be Cruel" - suggest that Walker may be inching closer to locating a sound that's his and his alone. pushing the tracks much further-out here, they pull back from the brink of the just about controlled chaos that, say, the fuzzed-out second half of 'Sweet Satisfaction' - otherwise a not so distant relative of John Martyn's "Don't Want to Know" - messes around with. Recordings of recent live shows find Walker and co. ![]() Although intensity dips a bit whenever Primrose Green tips its hat towards more traditional folk fare (the exception being the hypnotic solo closer "Hide In The Roses"), this level of inspired interplay is sustained for much of the album, resulting in a record that's both far too spirited to resort to retro mimicry and sizable step onwards from the more predictably retro finger-picking of Walker's debut.Įven so, there's a sense that Walker is holding back a bit, pruning these jams to better suit any short attention spans. As electric guitar and piano attack the tune from unexpected angles, however, the performance picks up impressive momentum, resulting in a sparkling, restlessly churning yet still tight and focused groove that matches the themes of sunshine and strangeness in the song, inspired by a psychedelically assisted trip to a beauty spot. ![]() As a composition, the title track - little more than an endlessly repeated, cyclical riff for musicians to throw licks at - isn't much to rave about. Some of the credit belongs to the excellent combo the guitarist-singer from Illinois is joined by. As much as the innovators (who, lest we forget, were equally inspired by what had gone before them) Walker looks up to, this jazz-blues-folk-rock mesh isn't an ill-fitting role taken on in order to chase a fad or a bloodless pastiche that speaks volumes about a lack of original vision instead, this ragged, loose, appealingly free-flowing music's quite clearly what Walker was born to play. ![]() However, Walker inhabits these timeworn templates with a conviction and drive that make copycat accusations seem ridiculous. The expressionist vocal style that favours how things are said over what is actually being said, as honed and perfected by Buckley and Van Morrison the pulsating, heavily jazz-tinged grooves reminiscent of Pentangle the ecstatic explorations into the borderlands of jazz, folk, blues and rock of John Martyn around Inside Out, with added touches of traditional British folk forms and the US odd-folk tradition that powered up much of Walker's debut All Kinds of You it's all here, creating a spectacularly well-studied time capsule trip to the long-gone era when psychedelic influences frazzled the earnest edges of folk-orientated singer-songwriters. For example, describing the loose-limbed "Summer Dress" without instantly mentioning Tim Buckley, more specifically the far-out explorations of Starsailor and Lorca, is only really possible if you've never happened to come across Buckley's wilder outings. In a way, the debt Ryley Walker owes to his inspirations is just as blatantly obvious as the similarity between the most omnipresent mega-hit of 2013 and Gaye's '76 funk opus "Got to Give It Up". ![]()
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