![]() These songs also put his voice and lyrics front and center-like he’s hoping to dazzle us with the strength and passion of his pipes and the inspired poetry they sing, a la Van Morrison. Disappointingly, four of Golden Sings’s eight cuts slow things down to a dirge-like pace that de-emphasizes the value of his playing. Unfortunately, none of the other seven songs on Golden Sings sound anything like “ The Halfwit in Me.” Part of what makes that track successful is the way Walker uses his spindling guitar melodies to carry it forward at a brisk clip, showcasing delicate instrumental interplay and allowing his serviceable voice to complement rather than dominate the song. The song pulls from the successful elements of Walker’s previous work while embracing these newer (albeit still “retro”) influences and melding it all into a beautiful, pensive six-minute suite that seems to declare the official arrival of an artist who’s on his own path. Downtown Artery +Ġ6 – Milwaukee, Wis.On his past two records, Walker fetishized the sounds and aesthetics of quasi-mystical British folk of the late 1960s and early ’70s everything about 2015’s Primrose Green, from the songs, to Walker’s vocals, to even the photography and font on the album cover screamed “revivalist.” However, on Golden Sings opener “ The Halfwit in Me,” Walker tones down those influences while shifting things back home to the late ’90s baroque folk of Chicago artists like Gastr del Sol and Jim O’Rourke. You can preorder the album here.Ģ7 – Boise, Idaho Idaho Botanical Gardens – Great Escape Seriesģ0 – Fort Collins, Colo. His tour dates can be found below, along with the tracklist and artwork for The Lillywhite Sessions. Walker will be touring for the remainder of the year. It’s a song that would feel right at home on Walker’s latest release, May’s Deafman Glance, which is a testament to the sincerity of Walker’s intentions with the project on the whole. It’s almost shocking how similar Walker’s vocal delivery is to Matthews’ at times, and the instrumental interplay is what Matthews’ band would sound like if they came up playing at underground jazz clubs instead of East Coast college campuses. The result is something more complicated, if less breezily feel-good than the original. Walker’s take on “Busted Stuff” finds him navigating the common ground between the goofy playground jazz of the original and his own jazz-tinged post-rock vamps. Most of the songs were eventually released on the album Busted Stuff, but the unmastered quality, as well as the forbidden-fruit aspect of The Lillywhite Sessions, made it a fan favorite for years. It was also one of the first albums to gain notoriety for being shared on Napster, back when the music industry was just catching on to that sort of thing. The original Lillywhite Sessions was a “lost album” of sorts, one that the band scrapped midway through recording. With that in mind, it was prescient of Walker to choose DMB’s “coolest” album to put his spin on. But he’s worn his influences on his sleeve-and on his social media accounts-since the start, and this project finds him reimagining what it means for a band to be “uncool.” The album is “for anyone who didn’t enter this world with fully formed musical tastes,” according to a press release. Since Walker is a post-rock-influenced, instrumentally intricate indie-folk songwriter, one would expect him to hide away those parts of his musical upbringing that the cool music kids might make fun of. Walker’s unabashed love of bands considered “uncool” by the indie-rock tastemakers has long been part of his mystique. Ryley Walker has released a cover of Dave Matthews Band’s “Busted Stuff” from his forthcoming re-imagining of DMB’s lost album The Lillywhite Sessions, out Nov.
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