12/14/2022 0 Comments Ryley walker course in fable bandcamp![]() ![]() ![]() Consider the heart-on-sleeve lyrics of album standout, “Rang Dizzy”: “I am wise/ I am so fried/ Rang dizzy inside/ Fuck me, I’m alive.” Building on the prog-folk jams of albums past, Walker-joined by a stellar group of mostly Chicago cohorts in guitarist Bill MacKay, bassist Andrew Scott Young, drummer Ryan Jewell, and cellists Nancy Ives and Douglas Jenkins-is operating on a whole other spectrum. On his newest record, Course in Fable, Walker combines catharsis with-what else?-heroic feats of six-string slaying.įrom the moment the in-your-face, prog rock riff pyrotechnics are unleashed on “Striking Down Your Big Premiere,” the album’s arena-ready opening epic, the spirit uplift is firing on all cylinders. The mystical fingerpicking and majestic tunesmithery that define records like 2016’s Golden Sings That Have Been Sung and Deafman Glance, which arrived two years later, carved out a sound-exploring niche all his own. Published as part of Album Roundup - April 2021 | Part 3.Pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to trackĪn ace folker, shredder, songwriter and improviser, the thirty-something New York City-via-Chicago guitarist Ryley Walker has left few musical stones unturned. 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. ![]()
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