New Threats From The Soul

Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band’s *New Threats from the Soul* is the kind of funny, rambling, junk-shop-scouring, bumper-sticker-talking, dollar-draft-guzzling daydream on which minor indie legends are born. The songs here unfurl with the workmanlike self-pity of ’90s country (“New Threats from the Soul”) or Springsteen anthems on salaries not yet adjusted for inflation (“Monte Carlo / No Limits”), dappled with Casio flutes and drum machines whose not-quite prime-time textures only go to fill in the blanks where Davis’ walls of lyrics drop off. His characters are hopeless wrecks redeemed only (and then only occasionally) by their insistence to get up off their dumb asses and try again, and yet reveal in that dumbass insistence something beautiful, or at least true. “The Spanish moss, it weeps in mourning of/Not only personal but also planetary loss/Not just for the bloodshed, but, by god, for what the Bloody Marys cost,” he sings on the opening of “Mutilation Springs.” Then there’s eight more minutes. Call it busy doin’ nothing.

The rich and dazzling album from the singer-songwriter is filled with rambling, gambling characters looking for hope. It’s the late arrival of an essential new voice in American indie rock.

New Threats from the Soul provides another compelling flowering of a unique and idiosyncratic songwriting talent from Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band.

Ryan Davis' second album with The Roadhouse Band is jam-packed with arresting turns of phrase, collapsing structures, and revelatory and bizarre unions of form. It's perfect.

Ryan Davis' second LP, New Threats From the Soul, establishes the singer as an essential voice in Americana and is for those on a soul-searching journey.

New Threats from the Soul by Ryan Davis & The Road House Band album review by David Saxum for Northern Transmissions, the LP is now out