This Ryan Davis is a happening type. A longtime mainstay of the Louisville, Kentucky, alternative arts and music scenes, he also co-founded the multimedia Cropped Out festival and runs his own Sophomore Lounge record label. He's also a virtuoso storyteller, whose songs are mostly vast unfurling narratives with more verses than a poetry anthology. Davis served time previously in State Champion, across whose four albums of mostly familiar alt.country – think Son Volt, Silver Jews – there are tantalising hints on tracks like “Death Preferences”, “There Is A Highlights Reel” and “Brain Days” of the music he’s currently making with The Roadhouse Band.
This Ryan Davis is a happening type. A longtime mainstay of the Louisville, Kentucky, alternative arts and music scenes, he also co-founded the multimedia Cropped Out festival and runs his own Sophomore Lounge record label. He’s also a virtuoso storyteller, whose songs are mostly vast unfurling narratives with more verses than a poetry anthology. Davis served time previously in State Champion, across whose four albums of mostly familiar alt.country – think Son Volt, Silver Jews – there are tantalising hints on tracks like “Death Preferences”, “There Is A Highlights Reel” and “Brain Days” of the music he’s currently making with The Roadhouse Band.
Davis took a five-year songwriting sabbatical after State Champion’s Send Flowers (2018). The songs he eventually started writing that duly appeared on 2023’s Dancing On The Edge uniformly had a fantastical new heft, often unspooling in the lengthy manner of Neil Young’s “The Last Trip To Tulsa”, say, or Songs: Ohia’s “Farewell Transmission”, cryptic, discursive, touched by the absurd. The sensational New Threats From The Soul is a further elaboration of this digressionary poetry, seven songs that mostly find Davis ruefully considering life and what it’s become, asking the question on everyone’s lips. Is there a point to any of it, given the way it all ends, and the disappointments along the way?
At times these long, unwinding songs may remind you of the ruminative musings of Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, Will Oldham, maybe MJ Lenderman. Lou Reed, even. Most of all, you’ll probably think of David Berman’s Purple Mountains, whose sole, eponymous album was released less than a month before Berman’s suicide in 2019. As so often with Berman on that singular masterpiece, the skewed humour and jaunty breeziness Davis sometimes tunefully deploys disguises the heartbreak, grief, loss, yearning and desperation in his songs, an existential crisis in every rhyming couplet.
The nine-minute title track that opens the album, for instance, blows in on a warm melodic wind, the kind of tune you might have heard coming through an open window in the Summer Of Love, The Rascals’ “Groovin’”, perhaps. A musical haze, anyway, of melodica, pedal steel, piano, fiddle, Davis’s languid Southern drawl, Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin‘s lovely harmonies. The song itself is a lament for lost love that tracks a romance from euphoric blossoming (“You’re the new sheriff in the Wild West of my heart!”) to inevitable ruin (“Your sweet nothings still sour the sheets on the bed”). It’s by turns hilarious, ecstatic, broken, like a barroom full of beautiful losers. In “Monte Carlo/No Limits”, another abandoned lover crashes his car outside his ex’s house and leaves it there as a reminder of the wreck their love has become, as if this will somehow win her back. “Better If You Let Me” is contrite apology, like Warren Zevon’s “Reconsider Me”, someone promising to change, become new and improved, even as he’s barking orders from afar: “Leave the fish tank light on, baby/Turn up the motherfucking ‘Fur Elise’.”
The closest the album comes to unconditional despair is on the interlinked “Mutilation Springs” and “Mutilation Falls”, which between them account for 20 minutes of the album’s running time. “I can’t remember the last time the good times felt so bad,” Davis sings on the former. A desolate mood prevails, the music a fractured plane of old-school synths, sparse percussion, pedal steel, fiddle, a flute. They sound like songs from the place America has become, basically the equivalent of the most derelict room in that Motel 6 out near the Interstate. A dilapidated joint. Ghosts in the walls, broken windows, a body in the bathtub, screamers in the parking lot. Davis hardly recognises the place.
“I can barely tell the cattle roads from the chemtrails of our past lives,” he sings on the melodically handsome, windswept “The Simple Joy”, looking back at what used to be, panoramic and glorious. Sweeping strings and a mass of voices join him on a chorus that sounds like it’s being sung on a prairie by a wagon train choir who’ll probably turn out to be members of the Donner Party, snowbound in the Sierras, eating their own dead. The gorgeous, punningly titled “Walden Pawn” is a final beckoning. “I’ll be soaring home tonight in confusing winds,” he sings, the music behind him starlit and spectral, heading for a place of salvage and repair, asylum from vagrant drift in a world gone wrong. What an incredible head-spinning trip this album is.
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