The way the eerily inert Can’t Ask Why summarily gathers itself up into a troubled riff which trudges in a murderous circle is masterful, while the almost-stalling pace of In Castle Dome is immaculately judged, suspending the song like a beckoning fog bank. The overriding factor that sells these climatic shifts so strongly is the sense that Walker’s fellow musicians are absolutely with him in the zone, however fraught the sessions might have been. (Though anyone who doesn’t adore Carpet Crawlers can bite me.) “I listened to a lot of Genesis records,” Walker abstractedly offers, but there’s approximately no discernible Genesis influence on here, you’ll either be disappointed or relieved to know. A similarly turbulent maelstrom overturns the equanimity of Telluride Speed, while the dissonant, confrontational tone-clusters of Accommodations hints at the compass-overboard experimentation of Tim Buckley – and, oddly, Allan Holdsworth’s old band, ’Igginbottom. The jazz-rock frenzy which blows in out of nowhere in the middle of the otherwise placid and thoughtful 22 Days is indicative of the proggier tendencies which tug at the album’s margins. No one should ever have to sink so low, but if you can salvage pearls such as Opposite Middle and 22 Days from the abyss – the former with its tightly syncopated, Zappa-esque chord augmentations, the latter sharing a certain texture with the swaddled, swarming Astral Weeks – then at least such souvenirs imply that the journey wasn’t wasted. In a press release of striking candour, Walker speaks of his “crippling depression” over the past year, and offhandedly remarks of the album that it “mostly just comes from being bummed out.” So if proof were ever needed that buds can still blossom in darkness, it’s all over this record.
However, no one’s saying it isn’t a genuinely great album: a preoccupied and deeply immersed heart-art journal, graced with discreetly nailed-on band performances while simultaneously worrying away at its own edges. In the case of Deafman Glance, what’s been delivered is… perhaps too unsettled and non-linear to be widely interpreted as a modern masterpiece, with its sudden storms, its smudges and bootprints, and its opaque interludes of atonality. The fact that he follows his own volatile star, without the first clue where it’s taking him, is laudable and not a little exhilarating, as his audiences don’t really know what they’re going to get, either.
At literally any point, if he were to meekly shape-shift into the guise of a more vanilla-flavoured acoustic folk-blues troubadour, his commercial stock would accordingly grow and his newly spayed output would consequently dribble unremarked from high-end, low-volume stereo set-ups at dinner parties from Manhattan to Sandbanks. For Ryley Walker, the option of treading a safer and more lucrative career path has always existed.