“That work-to-the-bone, hide-your-emotions middle America thing.” The 32-year-old was raised working-class in the formerly industrial “rust belt” city of Rockford, Illinois. His career-best new album – the proggy, unexpectedly pretty Course in Fable – is the sound of an artist treating his life as such. Walker, who attempted suicide as a consequence of his addictions, says that being here today is “a miracle”. Given how much Walker has had to give up over the last few years – emerging from the drug and alcohol dependency that shaped his adult life – it’s hard to begrudge him one last remaining vice.
“I must give up smoking,” the singer-songwriter frowns, lighting up his third cigarette. Speaking on a video call from Massachusetts, Ryley Walker is obscured by a blaze of sunlight coming through a large open window as he filters out the air in his apartment. Listen to A Tap on the Shoulder in the context of Ryley’s glorious Course in Fable listento it in the context of Grubbs’s playing with Loren Connors, Jim O’Rourke, Taku Unami, and others or listen to it as if you’ve never heard note one from these soulful odd birds, the two of them curiously, quixotically committed to working inside and beyond song form.Ryley Walker took a long path back to the things he loves: music and life.Ġ5 April 2021 | Fergal Kinney | The Guardian ( original link) Juggernauts, A Tap on the Shoulder toggles effortlessly between microscope, telescope, and Cinemascope, letting the smallest of gestures land in all of its sonic specificity before opening the scene up to disorienting panoramas. And where the duo’s live performances thus far have been set-length What’s good for the geezer is good for the, etc. Ryley’s hellion musical fearlessness lights a fire under the more typically Apollonian, chess-masterly Grubbs. Don’t think for a second that these shorthand descriptions suffice.Įlectric guitars make electronic music. Studio sessions were clearly in the cards, and the result is A Tap on the Shoulder, a collection of duo performances that veers from crystalline instrumental compositions (“A Tap on the Shoulder,” “Accepting Most Plans,” “Dorothy Kept”) to animated alien chatterfests (“Leslie Steinberger”), and from ecstatic extrapolations charging this way and that (“Pump Fake on the Death Rattle,” “The Madman from Massachusetts in an Empty Bar”) to, I don’t know, words don’t do the trick (“Uglification”).
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(One of these live sets was released earlier this year as Fight or Flight Simulator on Café OTO’s Takuroku label.) Mutual admiration society and David Grubbs and Ryley Walker had been taking notes on one another’s playing for some time before they hit the stage together on a couple of blistering occasions immediately pre-pandemic. How about now? (Not for you to decide.) Or exactly what it means-except in the aftermath. You never know when that tap’s going to come. Pressing info : First press on black vinyl LP.Ī Tap On The Shoulder by David Grubbs & Ryley Walker RYLEY WALKER & DAVID GRUBBS A Tap On The Shoulder – Vinyl LP (black)
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