Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band - New Threats From The Soul

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. Boldinstinct 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 DoomsdayClock 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? Thatfundamental question seems to me to be the bedrock upon which New Threats is built. It reckons mightily with theperplexities of human efficacy and agency, of acting versus being acted upon, in an absurd and debased world. The I ofRyan'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, andhis alienation is total. Or nearly: he has, or has had in some antagonizing past, a love life, although this too is compromisedby cravenness and error and ineptitude. Is there no possibility of self-improvement or self-understanding outside of itsinversion, 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 thesands of yourself? Ryan sings, while giving you plenty to move to. The songs are all earwigs; the arrangements genuinelythrilling, enlivening efforts by the crackerjacks that comprise the sprawling Roadhouse Band. Each trip through the recordreveals more of the depth and breadth and tangle of its tapestry. On my twenty-something-th spin I discover wonderful newthreads�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'veearned 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 ahundred 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 werefunny, 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 guysfrom 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'toften sign up to sing pap.)New Threats from the Soul is a masterclass in reducing the sublime to the prosaic, immensity to infinitesimality, and viceversa (the trick can only work both ways). Everything in our universe is essentially flotsam or jetsam, rubbish heaps offragments and shards, a pile of voodoo dolls and iron scrap in the backyard for the meek to inherit. We, especially, arejerry-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 infiniteamount of hope in the universe, just not for us. At least, I would venture for coldest comfort, not as we have constitutedourselves. When Ryan has the penny slot yell 'What even am I, by god?' toward the high stakes room, the soul chills andthrills at being so seen. New Threats suggests that maybe, just maybe, something like redemption is possible, but only oncewe're entirely emptied out and hawked in toto down at Walden Pawn.�Nathan Salsburg, April 2025