Ryley Walker is the reincarnation of the true American guitar player. Raised on the banks of the ol’ Rock River in northern Illinois, Ryley’s early life doesn’t give us much more than Midwestern mundanity to speak of. Things start to pick up for young Walker when he moves to Chicago in 2007 and briefly attempts a collegiate lifestyle as he storms the always fecund local noise scene with his Jasmine-brand electric guitar; just a cheap knock-off from which he could coax unearthly sound hallucinations. A few years of wasted finger-bleeding basement shows variably under the names Heatdeath and Wyoming (with requisite cassette-only releases) firmly established his name locally, if not always positively. The world may associate Ryley Walker with Chicago, but he was raised by working class folks in Rockford. He first played music there, cranking out punk rock like the stuff he heard in skater videos.

Ryley transitioned slowly into the finger-style artist we know today in 2008 and 2009, still opening for synth nerds in basement venues, but growing by leaps and bounds in virtuosity. He perfunctorily maintained day jobs with frequently amusing results, famously getting fired from Jimmy John’s for practicing in the walk-in freezer. By 2011, at age 21, he finally began issuing recordings from his already impressive catalog of compositions. Evidence of Things Unseen and Of Deathly Premonitions (with Daniel Bachman) appeared briefly as limited cassette releases.

It was a 2012 bike accident that set Ryley on his current path. He quit his day job to recuperate but instead of returning to the grind, he duked it out on the rock club circuit. Practice became more diligent; he began lacquering his fingertips at cheap salons, permanently giving his playing aggression and tone difficult to achieve with naked fingertips or finger picks. Though seen as part of the fraternity of young guitar masters like William Tyler and Daniel Bachman, his voice defied that stereotype.
He was finding a new path refracting the British traditional spectrum, from Bert Jansch to Nick Drake, and defying all the limitations of the genre. His 2013 recordings, that resulted in The West Wind EP and All Kinds of You LP, fully express these Anglophilic tendencies to the point of nearly exhausting their possibilities.

This brings us to the present. The board was barely reset from the All Kinds of You sessions before Ryley was corralling his by-then-rejiggered band back into Minbal studios in Chicago to solidify a totally new direction in his creative vision. Primrose Green couldn’t be restrained. It begins near where All Kinds of You leaves off but quickly pushes far afield. The title sounds pastoral and quaint, but the titular green has dark hallucinogenic qualities, as does much of the LP.

The band is a mixture of new and old Chicago talent, blending both jaded veterans of the post-rock and jazz mini-circuits together with a few eager, open-eared youths. Maybe you have heard about how the city's musicians pull together the best across genres? The players on Primrose Green are the people who are doing it. Frank Rosaly, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Anton Hatwich, and Jason Adasiewicz are linchpins of the contemporary Chicago jazz scene. Whitney Johnson, Ben Boye, and Brian Sulpizio have done correspondingly adventurous work in their diverse improvisational, compositional, and production activities within the realms of rock, folk, and instrumental music. They bring to this music not only lyricism, but also acute instincts for where to fray its fabric.

Ryley didn’t have much time to write this LP, so some of it he didn’t… bits of lyrics were improvised into full-blown songs in the studio on the fly more often than not. However, the ratty bits of handwritten words that make up the balance of the record were largely pieced together while on an ill-fated 2013 tour with Irish guitar whiz Cian Nugent. The title track “Primrose Green” was nearly discarded after its incarnation on a bleak St. Patrick’s Day spent in Oxford, Mississippi. “Primrose Green” is a colloquial term for a cocktail of whiskey and morning glory seeds that has a murky, dreamy, absinthian quality when imbibed, and a spirit-crushing aftereffect the morning after. It is the moment before departure from Ryley’s All Kinds Of You mindstate.

Ryley Walker is excited to announce his new album, Primrose Green, out March 30st on Dead Oceans. Ryley will tour throughout 2015 in support of Primrose Green including shows with Zola Jesus, Hamilton Leithauser, Hiss Golden Messenger, Kevin Morby, Moon Duo and Steven Gunn and performances at Big Ears Festival, Savannah Stopover Festival, Tomorrow Never Knows and FRZN Fest.

Contact promo : Agnieszka Gérard / agnieszka@secretlygroup.com