Walker has released his albums on a who’s-who of independent labels over the past decade - Tompkins Square, Dead Oceans, Thrill Jockey and Drag City among them. “Fuck me, I’m alive,” Ryley sings at one point, a moment of both disbelief and pure joy. Balanced with necessary doses of dark humor and oddball poetry, Course In Fable feels most of all like a life-affirming record, fresh air in the lungs, sun on your skin. (And speaking of weird, Ryley says that in addition to Genesis, much of the album’s inspiration comes from “Australian extreme scooter riders on YouTube and balding gear heads on Craigslist.” Go figure.)īeneath the wondrous interplay, you’ll find some of Walker’s most personal – if still typically cryptic - lyrics, hinting at some of the trials the songwriter has been dealing with in recent years.
Like Walker’s beloved Genesis, the pop element is never too far from the surface even when shit gets weird. Melodies open drift in unexpected directions but remain downright hummable. Tricky time signatures abound but feel as natural as can be. Wiry guitars melt into gorgeous string sections (arranged by Douglas Jenkins of the Portland Cello Project). But no matter how complex it gets, the album is never overwhelmingly busy.
#Ryley walker new album full#
Course In Fable’s songs are twisty, labyrinthine things, stuffed full of ideas (Walker half-jokingly calls it his “prog record”). The result is a rich, immersive affair - a headphones record if ever there was one. 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.
Published as part of Album Roundup - April 2021 | Part 3.Ryley Walker currently resides in New York City.
Walker has released not one but two superb, and vastly different, albums this year. It’s hard to find something to dislike anywhere on Course in Fable - each track naturally flows into the next. Walker’s strategy works in the context of a great jam, a somber track, and multiple foot-tapping guitar songs with complex chords that significantly step-up the music styles being combined. So rather than gush over perceived intent - or the potential implications of Walker’s words - it might be best to just let each line, each verse, wash over you, like the smooth, rolling guitars their significance is notable but fleeting. This writer’s style sees him writing in “lyric groups” of two or three lines that are intuitively combined in ways that fit with a song’s rhythms and arrangements. So while it seems only natural and even easy to start dissecting these songs and finding the personal meaning in them, line by line, Walker has indicated, in multiple interviews, that this is not his intention. “Striking Down Your Big Premiere,” makes for a strong introduction to Course in Fable, setting the tone for the album: “ If I could wear a capsule/Of all the world’s hairline fracture/The biggest wig in the show.” Another song, “Rang Drizzy,” doesn’t shy away from discussing Walker’s 2019 suicide attempt (“ I am wise/I am so fried/Rang dizzy inside/Fuck me, I’m alive”) as it evokes the experience of hitting rock bottom. It opens with a two-lick guitar hook that sounds like it was ripped from Genesis’s playbook. This eminently listenable set is filled with jazzy guitars and intense lyrical couplets across a brilliant 40 minutes.
Course in Fable is Ryley Walker’s second superb effort of 2021, vastly different than his first but no less affecting.Īfter a massively successful independent release earlier in the year, Ryley Walker returns with Course in Fable, a sprawling folk album drenched in the ‘80s prog-rock with which Walker is intimately familiar.