We all remember a song or album that smashed our preconceptions of what music could be, that illuminated its power and made it feel like something that actually makes the world go round. It’s why most people stop seeking new music at a certain age – not because the boundary-shaking, revelatory kind isn’t being made, but because that feeling becomes increasingly unattainable. It’s a little like Ryan Davis sings in ‘The Simple Joy’, a beautiful singalong from his new album New Threats From the Soul: “Perhaps the love we had/ Was not what made the globe turn/ But more akin, in fact/ To what made the cows lay down.” After more than a dozen years of honing his songwriting with the band State Champion and a few experimenting with drum machines and weird synths, Davis sounds grounded yet unconstrained on his sophomore record with the Roadhouse Band, far removed from the romantic ideals of music yet deeply existential and strangely spiritual about it. The songs are not simple but wordy, knotty, and outstretched while hinging on some elemental truth. It may not bring back the feeling, but it might make you feel, as Davis later sings, “with the feelings that I don’t express.” That’s more than most music, now or ever, would joyfully bestow.
1. New Threats From the Soul
There is nothing quite so fearsome about the way ‘New Threats From the Soul’ begins; Ryan Davis has a gift for housing existentially dispiriting lyrics within immediately inviting music, but the opening title track is downright jaunty. The addition of flute, pedal steel, and finger-snaps could fool anyone not looking at the song’s name or length, but it doesn’t take long for Davis to stretch his narrator’s pathos into the metaphysical realm. Even the way he writes about the dissolution of a relationship is wryly illuminating. He’s not haunted by could-have-beens – he’s bullied by parallel timelines. He recognizes the disparity between where he is and where he could have been not as the result of some wild miscalculation, but “a slew of mismeasurements.” When Davis raises his voice to sing the record’s first real quotable line, “I thought that I could make a better life with bubblegum and driftwood,” Catherine Irwin’s accompaniment only makes the following line more cutting: “Her sweet nothings were nothing more than dead sourdough.” Not even the instruments by his side are there to offer reprieve. When he’s “wishing someone could quiet down these deafening threats from the soul,” they roar in response, making their presence felt. They’re not supposed to be consolatory, after all, but soulful – and as Davis hollers towards the end, “Can one really blame the soul?”
2. Monte Carlo/No Limits
Not a two-part song so much as two songs bizarrely strewn into one, ‘Monte Carlo/No Limits’ is both the shortest and perhaps most sonically daring track on the album – not to undermine how catchy it is. The fiddle and drum ‘n’ bass break gets stuck in your head more quickly than it jars, a sly if unintentional way of underlining the Roadhouse band’s own lawless approach. The first time Davis sings “There have been limits that I have pushed past,” it ushers in a wall of noise reflective of a whole other experimental world. But it also, of course, makes perfect sense within the context of the song, in which the narrator’s boundary-crossing gesture of love transforms the I into we, a lovingly reckless spirit sweetened by Jenny Rose’s harmony vocals and finally, strangely turned communal.
3. Mutilation Springs
Maybe it’s down to the sudden sparseness of the music, or how the harmony vocals accompanying Davis’ despairing baritone are reduced to a soft hum, but when he sings, “I can’t remember the last time/ The good times got so bad,” you believe him. More impressive, though, is the fact that his opening thesis – that the Spanish moss “weeps in mourning of/ Not only personal but also/ Planetary loss” – also grows more palpable and convincing as the song stretches out to a dazzling 12 minutes. More richly sprawling than purely adventurous, the arrangement branches off, not just in different directions, but in startling symbiosis with Davis’ spoken word. Just like the line “How do two people/ Even do these things?” is as undeniably personal, the flurry of strings, plinking piano, synths, and saxophone amount to a cosmic sigh. You have no doubt it waves and weeps; you don’t even think about it. And just like that, “The dream is dead/ The hope persists.”
4. Better If You Make Me
At the record’s halfway point we get its most traditional-sounding track, because why tangle up a song with a simple promise if you’re trying to sell it? “There are times when a white flag/ Is nothing but a blank canvas that waves/ For what happens next,” he sings, but for the most part uses the first person to announce surrender and a willingness to change. The reason gets buried with each repetition, but you can’t help but be excited for what’s next – album-wise, at least.
5. The Simple Joy
You don’t have to be a visionary songwriter to write a country song about the simple joys, but how many others would slip the phrase “simpler loneliness” into the chorus? The spectre of heartbreak is all but gone on ‘The Simple Joy’, but Davis walks about feelings that otherwise remain inaccessible, untangling big ideas he spends most of the record poeticizing. “I learned that time was not my friend or foe/ More like one of the guys from work,” he sings. Will Oldham, who sounds like one of those guys, does not half-ass his backing vocals – how could he not delight in a line like “My ribcage was what but a looney bin”? And how could you, as the listener, not belt out along to the chorus?
6. Mutilation Springs
If you have reached this point on the record, you won’t mind Davis and his Roadhouse Band repurposing the musical themes of ‘Mutilation Springs’ and extending what is admittedly “not much of a story, but by God, I’ve got to dog-ear a chapter or two.” If anything, you might find it revelatory, the way they rummage through musical memories – from playing a Gymnopedie to self-expression in guest rooms and “hair metal afternoons” – to reach a point of ambiguous yet genuine inspiration, punctuated by a single reverberating guitar note. “Lightning found me here.” The hope or the flames we burst into? The past or the better days ahead? If it’s all gone, let this be the dance floor for hopes deemed necrophiliac.
7. Crass Shadows (at Walden Pawn)
“Death has loaned us to life,” Davis repeated on his previous album, Dancing on the Edge, the kind of primordial truth he here proclaims he “used to hock.” The record’s sundazed, creeping closer instead climaxes by brilliantly rhyming “miracle” with “urinal,” though Davis doesn’t let the Dionysian absurdism get in the way of his unwavering spiritual soul-searching. Just pay attention to the earnestness of the line that follows: “Your life, my life, and all the lonely others anywhere near it swirl.” And the swirl is dirty, sure, and dark, and nonsensical. But it is also restless, enlightening, and somehow communal. Not a simple loneliness, perhaps, but a loneliness made simpler.
