A modern day classic in the style of “Solid Air”; finds Ryley Walker roaming through languid folk-jazz with rich instrumentation and deft improvisation.
Ryley Walker’s Primrose Green is the guitarist’s second LP in less than a year, and he’s already gotten way better. Last year’s All Kinds Of You was a good meditative folk record. Primrose Green has that, too, but it also has highlights like “Summer Dress” and “Love Can Be Cruel,” songs that incorporate jazz and psychedelia, unfolding into strange and exhilarating passages. It has roots in the British jazz-folk of the ’70s, but in 2015 it feels like it’s born from some other place entirely, or at least from Walker’s custom cocktail for which the album’s titled: whiskey with morning glory seeds.
Summoning up the spirit of songwriting past masters, Primrose Green takes elements of Van Morrision, Nick Drake, John Martyn and more without ever descending into pastiche – instead it’s a cosmic journey into jazz-inflected summertime rock and roll. The instrumentation positively dances amid brass, organ and fancy fret-work while the dizzying Sweet Satisfaction extends proceedings into a darker, rampaging terrain.
Ryley Walker ”Sweet Satisfaction”(from Primrose Green)
”I came up with that in the middle of winter in a desolate Chicago last year, it gets really cold there, way below zero, three feet of snow, dangerous to go outside. I think it’s kind of a cover poet drunk song, a desperate song. You have seven or eight drinks and all of a sudden you think you’re this poet and can reach into a woman’s heart with this poem. It comes from that standing point. A drunk leaning against the wall poet. We had to cut that song down, because originally it was like fifteen minutes long. Maybe in the box set in twenty years! I like that version better but the label thought there was no room left on the record. We had to edit out that jam section in the end. It went on forever, not in a bad way, I thought it was pretty cool with the strings and that bit that sounded like Terry Riley.”
The Fat Angel Sings 