With the release of his second full-length album Primrose Green on Dead Oceans at the end of March, Chicago’s favorite progressive folk songsmith / unofficial American Spirit spokesman Ryley Walker stands poised to become another Great New Hope for the future of ‘Murican guitar music. Salty pundit types IRL and online will tell you that the “guitar is dead,” or at least “lame,” or “like, bad.” You’ve heard this. These people do not deserve a rebuttal, and know nothing. To sit here and list a roster of Walker and his visionary contemporaries that continue to recontextualize the guitar — even within compositional structures and ensembles that could be considered, on some level, [traditional] [retro] [nostalgic] — would unduly stoke the fire of the “guitar is dead” argument. Walker silences the haters with a simple twofold strategy: 1. breeze ‘em out; 2. keep shredding.
Jam “Primrose Green” and you’ll notice an evolution from 2014’s All Kinds of You in terms of both Walker’s tightly structured songwriting and the interplay of his accompanists. The track balances a chord progression built over flitting hammer-on phrases and ascending melodic interludes with the band’s push-and-pull backdrop of harmonic accents and rhythmic rushes of activity. Chicago jazz/avant-crossover heavyweights Anton Hatwich (bass) and Frank Rosaly (drums) breathe together as a single entity, rollicking through transitions and bouncing squarely back into place for each chorus. Brian Sulpizio’s guitar and Ben Boye’s keys gild Walker’s arrangement with swirling phrases that manage to sound off-the-cuff despite having been honed over months of touring. Walker, of course, constitutes the core of his own fantasy. He sits cross legged among his friends, pours out streams of precise sixteenth notes, and belts out his lyrics about, you know, getting high on seeds in the woods, with more confidence and clarity than we’ve yet heard from him on record.
• Ryley Walker: http://www.windishagency.com/artists/ryley_walker
• Dead Oceans: http://www.deadoceans.com/
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