Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band - New Threats From the Soul

2023’s Dancing On The Edge was quickly beloved by those who stumbled upon it, earning high praise from publications like Pitchfork & The Line Of Best Fit, who deemed it a “remarkable, endlessly rewarding debut.” His second album, New Threats From The Soul, reckons mightily with the perplexities of human efficacy and agency in an absurd and debased world. This probably sounds hopelessly plodding and severe. It is not—not remotely. It’s a shit-ton of fun. The songs are all earwigs; the arrangements genuinely thrilling, enlivening efforts by the crackerjacks that comprise the sprawling Roadhouse Band. Each trip through the record reveals more of the depth and breadth and tangle of its tapestry.

Across New Threats…, Ryan manages near-rhymes that a hundred years’ worth of monkeys labouring at Chat GPT-enabled typewriters couldn’t achieve: “bromeliad” and “necrophiliac”; “urinal” and “de Chirico.” Kinky Friedman lamented that people thought his funny songs were sad and his sad songs were funny, when they were both simultaneously. Like the Kinkster, Ryan can make you laugh through a lump in your throat. In his formidable crew of harmony singers there are four of the most gifted lyricists & vocalists to currently walk among us—Catherine Irwin, Will Oldham, Lou Turner, Myriam Gendron— which testifies to the profound heft of his writing (these folks don’t often sign up to sing pap).

New Threats From The Soul is a masterclass in reducing the sublime to the prosaic, immensity to infinitesimally, and vice versa (the trick can only work both ways). Everything in our universe is essentially flotsam or jetsam, rubbish heaps of fragments and shards. We, especially, are jerry-rigs of bubblegum and driftwood, inconsistencies and incoherencies, dead dreams and necrophagous hopes, “mismeasurements between the place where [we are] and the place where [we] could have been,” although somehow not—miracle of miracles—bereft of simple joys, as Davis sings on today’s single.