Detouring again from singer-songwriter mode, Ryley Walker’s second pairing-up with Charles Rumback ploughs deeper into Chicago’s post-everything pastures

Although Ryley Walker’s first two proper albums (2014’s All Kinds of You and 2015’s Primrose Green) cast a commanding presence with precision mining from the 1960s-70s folk-rock seams once dug-up by Bert Jansch, John Martyn, Van Morrison and Nick Drake, since then his itinerant restlessness has seen him strain to conform to singer-songwriter norms. Appearing increasingly less comfortable with being a vocalist and lyricist, it’s been instrumental side-project collaborations with the likes of Bill McKay and Charles Rumback that seem to have lured-out his creative lustre more easily. It’s to the latter free-jazz-groomed partner that Walker returns with this second duo LP.

Making no secret of his love for Chicago’s experimental post-everything crowd that has bequeathed us a strong body of work across since the 1990s, it seems fitting that Walker has now signed-up to Thrill Jockey for Little Common Twist, which follows-up the impressive vinyl-only Cannots LP released by Dead Oceans in 2016. Whereas its predecessor had a slightly loose and raw feel, here the combination of Walker’s guitars and Rumback’s drums – with some synth/electronic embellishments from producer John Hughes and guest bass on one track from Nick Macri – feels more finessed and generally warmer.

Opener “Half Joking”, with its gorgeously rambling acoustic guitar figures and skittering brushed drums, could thus easily have slotted somewhere into Jim O’Rourke’s totemic Bad Timing album. Thereafter, the choice references to branches of the extended Drag City/Thrill Jockey family-tree come thickly yet fluidly. Hence, the more abstract yet still earthbound “Self Blind Sun” nudges into the most elemental wordless corners of Sam Prekop’s classic eponymous 1999 solo long-player; “And You, These Sang” and “If You’re Down and Around” nod to the art-jazz-driven deconstructions of Isotope 217; “Menebhi” drifts into an ambient atonal fog like a period remix 12” from Tortoise circa TNT; the rustically-roaming yet polyrhythmically-underpinned “Idiot Parade” and “Ill-Fitting / No Sickness” imagine lost outtakes from Pullman’s Viewfinder or Directions’ Directions In Music; and the eerie circling psych-rock of “Worn and Held” feels like John McEntire having a stoner-jam with members of Eternal Tapestry in a dank basement.

Whilst Little Common Twist is a self-evident product of influences both direct and indirect, its imaginative and intuitive construction makes it no mere record collector geek-out. It captures a conjoining that has plenty of strong and flexible moving parts to keep shifting sideways and forwards. Hopefully, there be will another such regrouping for Messrs Walker and Rumback sooner rather than later.

thrilljockey.com

Adrian
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