Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band - the project of Louisville-based visual artist, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Ryan Davis.

Highly recommended if you like Alternative Country, Folk, AMERICANA, Independent, Silver Jews, Bill Callahan, Lambchop, Cass McCoombs, Sparklehorse, Giant Sand/Howe Gelb...

His second album, New Threats From The Soul, reckons mightily with the perplexities of human efficacy and agency in an absurd and debased world.

This probably sounds hopelessly plodding and severe. It is not-not remotely. It's a shit-ton of fun.

The songs are all earwigs; the arrangements genuinely thrilling, enlivening efforts by the crackerjacks that comprise the sprawling Roadhouse Band.

Each trip through the record reveals more of the depth and breadth and tangle of its tapestry.

2023's innitially limited debut Dancing On The Edge was quickly beloved by those who stumbled upon it, earning high praise from publications like Pitchfork & The Line Of Best Fit, who deemed it a "remarkable, endlessly rewarding debut." "[Davis is] someone with the originality, wit and ambition to cut through the murk." Uncut.

Across New Threats_, Ryan manages near-rhymes that a hundred years' worth of monkeys labouring 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 were funny, when they were both simultaneously.

Like the Kinkster, Ryan can make you laugh through a lump in your throat. In his formidable crew of harmony singers there are four of the most gifted lyricists & vocalists to currently walk among us -Catherine Irwin (of Freakwater fame), Will Oldham (BPB), Lou Turner (Styrofoam Winos) and Myriam Gendron - which testifies to the profound heft of his writing (these folks don't often sign up to sing pap).

New Threats From The Soul is a masterclass in reducing the sublime to the prosaic, immensity to infinitesimally, and vice versa (the trick can only work both ways).

Double vinyl or Digipak-CD available