![]() ![]() ![]() 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. Here, with this record, we risk limiting his access to personal disaster by flirting with success.Ī short lifetime of interminable practice and discipline have resulted in a masterpiece of an album, an album of a sort we haven't seen since the 1970s.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". ![]() ![]() Hardship and setbacks and dilapidated housing uncertainty only seem to spur him on creatively. No one knows what the future holds for young Ryley Walker. "Primrose Green" is a colloquial term for a cocktail of whiskey and morning glory seeds that has a murky, dreamy, absinthian quality when imbibed, and a spirit-crushing aftereffect the morning after. Patrick's Day spent in Oxford, Mississippi. The title track "Primrose Green" was nearly discarded after its incarnation on a bleak St. Bits of lyrics were improvised into full-blown songs in the studio, more often than not on the fly. Ryley didn't have much time to write this LP, so some of it he didn't. The band is a mixture of new and old Chicago talent, blending both jaded veterans of the post-rock and jazz mini-circuits together with a few eager, open-eared youths. The title sounds pastoral and quaint, but the titular green has dark hallucinogenic qualities, as does much of the LP. "Primrose Green" begins near where "All Kinds of You", his last record, leaves off but quickly pushes far afield. That's as much a testament to his roving, rambling ways, or as to the fact that his Guild D-35 guitar has endured a few stints in the pawnshop. Ryley Walker is the reincarnation of the true True American guitar Guitar player Player. ![]()
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