John McEntire, Course In Fable’s producer/engineer/ mixer, can rightly be called a legend for his work with Tortoise, Stereolab, The Red Krayola, Jim O’Rourke, and countless others over a prolific career that now spans more than three decades. 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 imagination and endless possibilities. Even though he emerged at first in folk-rock troubadour mode, it makes sense that he’s arrived at this point each LP has grown more intricate and assured, his influences distilling into something original and unusual. Walker spent his formative years in Chicago, absorbing those heady sounds and finding ways to make them his own. The masterful Course In Fable, the songwriter’s fifth solo effort, draws from the deep well of that city’s fertile 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. With its fascination quotient running so high, Walker's musical restlessness generously offers a sense of welcome anticipation that listeners can return to almost endlessly.Ryley Walker currently resides in New York City. of not enforcing an agenda has resulted in a quizzical and beguiling collection of tunes that, played in virtually any sequence, results in an album of unassuming but nearly constant intrigue and delight. Deafman Glance could easily have been a mess. With three guitars interlocking in an open-ended, ever-widening vamp punctuated by his halting, reedy baritone and striated instrumental cadences, closer "Spoil with the Rest" erupts in wonky, anthemic rock with a melodic pop hook. Conversely, "Rocks on Rainbow" harks back in time to his articulation of British Isles jazz-folk. "Expired" is initially a formless exercise in sonic adventure that moves back inside to embrace more recognizable confessional singer/songwriter fare with tender Mellotron embellishments. For starters, the ghost traces of the Sea and Cake that painted the margins of his last album are still here - check "Opposite Middle" - but they are often stretched to the breaking point in vanguard flights of abstract fancy, as evidenced by the Scott Walker-esque "Accommodations," the rewardingly weird fractured folk in "Can't Ask Why," the drifting, downer singer/songwriter poetics of "In Castle Dome," and the brazen Baroque folk-cum-Canterbury-styled prog in "Telluride Speed." In "22 Days," he transitions from placid and spacious acoustically driven psych before spiraling into jazz-rock that indulges in three guitars engaged in knotty interplay. While the sounds are steeped in Chicago's post-rock and experimental music scenes, they can't be neatly contained therein. Co-producing with keyboardist/arranger Leroy Bach, Walker surrounds himself with a familiar cast that includes guitarists Bill MacKay and Brian Sulpizio, bassist Matt Lux, drummer Mikel Avery, synthesist Cooper Crain, and others. In his press release he claims he wanted to escape the "jammy acoustic guy" in favor of recording something that better represented the various sonic territories that continually intrigued him. Despite the fact that it was all recorded in a studio, this is the guy you are likely to experience on-stage on any given night. While it's true that none of his previous recordings could neatly sum up all he brought to the table, Deafman Glance takes the stranger and more relaxed approach from Golden Sings and goes down the rabbit hole to emerge with a record that sounds more "like him" than anything previously issued. He was moving toward something too: a music, however fragmentary, of his own design. While 2016's Golden Sings That Have Been Sung was a marked step away from the American Primitive persona displayed on 2014's All Kinds of You and the following year's neo-psych Brit-folk of Primrose Green. Ryley Walker is a restless bugger it always seems like he's moving down the musical line faster than you can sum up or neatly categorize where he's been.
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