Charles Rumback & Ryley Walker: Little Common Twist
Thrill Jockey – 8 November 2019
This Chicago based duo’s first album Cannots was a great introduction into both polymath’s restless creative spirits and their passion for making music built from free improvised methods, each being a key member of the Chicago scene. Little Common Twist, their debut on Thrill Jockey, expands on the themes explored on the first record and feels like a set made by two musicians that have covered many more miles in the three years passed. This album is broader in nature than Cannots, although the songs are for the most part shorter, and its approach is less self-conscious. Take ‘If You’re Around and Down’ as an example; at eight minutes it’s the longest here and incredibly spacious and considered in its pacing. For the first couple of minutes, we experience only ambient sounds, before a slow and dissonant drumming is heard at some distance and then gradually edges closer to the ear. The song is Rumback’s show and his restraint as a drummer, ever so slowly building the rhythms around walker’s shimmering ambient sounds, and demonstrates the confidence of the two players, in each other and as a pair.
But of course, as you would expect with these two players, Little Common Twist packs a diverse array of musical styles into its eight tracks and forty minutes, and opener ‘Half Joking’ is as different as you can imagine from the above piece. Coming in with a gentle acoustic guitar part reminiscent of William Tyler‘s playing on Goes West, ‘Half Joking’ has Rumback playing it leisurely and letting Walker stretch out with a lovely folky melody and some technical fretboard moves demonstrating his chops as a guitarist. Towards the end, the drumming becomes more dilatant and Ryley’s playing intensifies slightly, but this introduction is a friendly and sunny tune. ‘Self Blind Sun’ partly continues the light mood, but here the obvious melodic nature of the first track is disregarded in favour of a more spacious and fractious piece of music, similar to ‘Naturita’, from Ryley’s SpiderBeetleBee album with Bill MacKay. Here he uses harmonics and string scratches to break up a melancholy little guitar piece, while Charles plays a far freer sounding drum part. The result is an even more interesting song than the first, which shrugs off any ideas of this being a straight-up album of acoustic comforts.
And that would certainly be a disservice to this set of songs, which are far more intriguing and impressive than that, especially given the straight-laced nature of ‘Half Joking’. Take ‘Idiot Parade’ as an example, which really sees the duo take off into a wide expanse of space, which they add strokes of sound to as they go, be it bass notes from prolific Chicago player Nick Macri, hand drums from Rumback or spiky acoustic picking from Walker. Amidst all of this are electronic ambient sounds that swirl around the rest of the music and create a dreamlike structure of a song that leads into the spooky intro to ‘And You, These Sang’. Here Ryley plays a slow electric guitar line, while Charles adds brushed drums to soft ghostly murmurs that sound like recent Bad Seeds creations. Again, it is fascinating stuff and really does illustrate the creativity flowing between these two performers.
Further in, ‘Ill-Fitting / No Sickness’ brings us back to the more melodically structured sound of the start of the record, with a technical piece of pastoral folk picking music. It plays like a more frenetic version of ‘Half Joking’, with Rumback’s urgent percussion, jumping in just over halfway through, really turning the processed beats sound of previous track ‘Menebhi’ on its head. If all of these sonic costume changes sound like a muddled album then fear not, because Little Common Twist is a very skilfully played and arranged piece of work, which balances its many flavours like an accomplished chef. It’s brilliant and once the waves of reverberating electric guitar and the addictive drumbeat of album closer ‘Worn and Held’ fade into a low tidal drone, you will want to go back to the beginning and experience the whole thing again.
Little Common Twist is out on 8 November 2019
Photo Credit: Nick LaRoche