Never one to hold his influences close to the chest, Walker parades them out unabashedly here, concocting a technicolor amalgam of smokey, cellar-club jazz and gypsy-traveler European folk. Van Morrison, Tim Buckley, Mike Cooper, and Bert Jansch of Pentagle fame, as well as Windy City cult acts like Gastr del Sol and Tortoise, all float through the marrow of these songs. But unlike what happened on Primrose Green, these influences don’t dictate his songwriting they guide it, urge it onward toward a new cohesiveness: Golden Sings… isn’t the work of an expert musician aiming for polished pastoral pastiche, for a predetermined tableau of rolling-down-the-hillside sonics and sunny moods, it’s the work of a budding artist intent on finding a voice somewhere between ancestral piety and unencumbered poetic invention. Inspired by his upbringing in Chicago and the homegrown artists he imbibed there, the record represents, not a 180-degree turn from last year’s Primrose Green, but a step closer to his roots and the brimming concrete wilderness where they seized their length. However, on Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, Walker’s third LP and first with producer-cum-Wilco veteran LeRoy Bach, this worldview shifts into new territory. Thanks to Walker’s ponderous finger-picked guitar style and lithe, warm-throated vocals, his sound seems to be inextricable from a certain folk-jazz pastoralism, a sonic worldview defined by basses walking along riversides and notes drifting through tall-grass prairies. This may be influenced by the Astral Weeks-inspired, mystic-troubadour cover of his sophomore album Primrose Green, or by his resplendently mellowed-out arrangements, or by his lyrical infatuation with edenic couples walking “two by two”, summer dresses clinging to skin, and Midwestern, faux-bucolic landscapes, but it’s not too far off the mark. Critical illustrations of Ryley Walker’s sound usually dip into the same reservoir of pastoral iconography: open meadows, open skies, barbed wire, wind, sunlight that cuts through trees and settles on the backs of new lovers.
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