Dancing On The Edge
SOPHOMORE LOUNGE
9/10
IT hardly needs saying that we live in an age of ever-shortening attention spans – especially when it comes to music. How dire has the situation got? Well, take the recent New York Times profile of Michael Stipe, wherein The 1975’s Matty Healy tells the ex-REM frontman of an encounter he’d had with a 12-year-old. “So I said, ‘Well, what songs do you like?’ And he said to me: ‘What, full songs?’ That was his response! The decimal point has moved! I didn’t realise that the denomination was now smaller than the song.”
In the face of these rapidly diminishing returns, it’s refreshing to sink into a record like Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band’s, a seven-song double LP with a lyric sheet as dense as its striking cover art. With several tunes that creep towards the 10-minute mark, there’s a sprawl and swagger here that not many current songwriters would dare to attempt. And yet Davis isn’t a rambler, really; his songwriting isn’t the stream-of-consciousness blather of a Dylan wannabe or a navel-gazing plumber of the quotidian depths. What’s most impressive about is how he keeps you hanging on every word, savouring his weird wisdom, oddball poetry and wry sense of humour. When one of these humble, vastly entertaining epics comes to a close, you might wish it had gone on even longer.
