It was back in 2018 that David Berman called Ryan Davis “the best lyricist who’s not a rapper going,” but somehow it took until this year for Davis to really get his big breakthrough. He’s a real wordsmith, and “New Threats From the Soul” is nearly overflowing with his nimble witticisms and canny references. It also just rocks: The Roadhouse Band’s brand of shitkickin’ country is tempered with a little indie rock, horns, and subtle electronics, but it’s enough to get anyone’s cowboy boots tapping along, not to mention the soaring harmonies from luminaries like Will Oldham, Myrian Gendron, and Catherine Irwin. For all the wordplay contained within “New Threats From the Soul”, my main takeaway might be that I can’t get its songs out of my head.
A lot of album covers catch your attention by foregrounding weird, psychedelic shapes, but “New Threats From the Soul” works kind of inversely: its intricate structure is oddly pleasing to the eye before you start noticing its eerie, supernatural details, the kind that also creep into Ryan Davis’ deceptively straighforward music. The singer-songwriter, who did the artwork himself, explained in an email: “I initially had something completely different in mind for the general direction of the “New Threats” record cover. When I went to pull out an old drawing pad to get started on it, I saw a very roughly pencilled-in version of the artwork that ended up being what we did use for the album art. It was something I had started years ago but had apparently lost the vision, which isn’t entirely common for my art practice these past 7 or 8 years. I like to finish what I start, it’s an important part of the process, just in terms of my own internal satisfaction…”
“But anyway, upon rediscovering, I stared at the sketch for about 45 seconds and that’s all it took to feel like this weird abandoned sketch of a psychedelic fish tank or whatever it was supposed to be at that stage would in fact be perfect, thematically speaking, for the overarching and/or underlying vibe of the songs therein,” he continued. “It took some digging in and carving out and slow refining of said themes, but in the end it felt and still feels pretty spot-on in its loose portrayal of a micro-environment for id, ego, and earthly nature to overlap and inhabit congruently. I don’t know what or where the image is supposed to be, exactly, but it feels like a window into the soul, or some sort of supernatural petri dish. There’s a bit of an aquatic-life motif throughout the songs on this record as well, which adds to the overall weight of the image. I’m pretty stoked with how it all came together.”
The Fat Angel Sings 