pre-order: out 25th July.
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If you don’t know it yet, it’s my privilege to tell you that Ryan Davis is one of the greatest songwriters of his generation. Bold instinct immediately insists that I lose the qualifications: he’s the greatest of his generation, he’s one of the greatest ever. Whatever. Posterity—if there is a posterity—will sort it out. Happily, New Threats from the Soul has beaten the Doomsday Clock to the wire, and we appear to have a little while left to revel in it, receive its revelations, and be revealed by it.
“Do I know what I’m doing,” A.R. Ammons muses in his Tape for the Turn of the Year, “or am I waiting for it to be done?” That fundamental question seems to me to be the bedrock upon which New Threats is built. It reckons mightily with the perplexities of human efficacy and agency, of acting versus being acted upon, in an absurd and debased world. The “I” of Ryan’s songs is both schlemiel and schlimazel: the spiller of the soup who promptly slips in it. Is this Job the clown? It is not: “I was hardly known to god much less those who had sought to make their home in a bullseye.” The subject is a cipher, and his alienation is total. Or nearly: he has, or has had in some antagonistic past, a love life, although this too is compromised by cravenness and error and ineptitude. Is there no possibility of self-improvement or self-understanding outside of its inversion, self-dissolution? Sentiment hardening and crumbling into sediment?
This probably sounds hopelessly plodding and severe. It is not—not remotely. It’s a shit-ton of fun. “Why not dance in the sands of yourself?” Ryan sings, while giving you plenty to move to. 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. On my twenty-something-th spin I discover wonderful new threads—a brief, breathtaking piano arpeggio by Anthony Fossaluzza; some hard-panned synth rumble that my three-year-old insists is a thunderstorm but that I say is a space rocket. These strike me as having held themselves in reserve till I’ve earned the wonder of encountering them. Is there a better definition of revelation?
The lyrics work similarly, of course, and will go on revealing themselves for, well, forever. Ryan manages near-rhymes that a hundred years’ worth of monkeys laboring 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: e.g. (although it’s so hard to pick just one example): “I learned that time was not my friend nor my foe / more like one of the guys from work.” In his formidable crew of harmony singers there are three of the most gifted lyricists to currently walk among us—Catherine Irwin, Will Oldham, Lou Turner—which testifies, I think, 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 infinitesimality, 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, a “pile of voodoo dolls and iron scrap in the backyard for the meek to inherit.” 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. The record functions in parallel with Kafka’s winking dictum that there is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, just not for us. At least, I would venture for coldest comfort, not as we have constituted ourselves. When Ryan has the penny slot yell “‘What even am I, by god?’” toward the high stakes room, the soul chills and thrills at being so seen. New Threats suggests that maybe, just maybe, something like redemption is possible, but only once we’re entirely emptied out and hawked in toto down at Walden Pawn.
