RYAN DAVIS & THE ROADHOUSE BAND 'New Threats From The Soul' 2LP

2LP set in tip-on gatefold sleeve with insert.

If you don’t know it yet, it’s my privilege to tell you that Ryan Davis might be one of the greatest songwriters of his generation.....

"New Threats from the Soul is a masterclass in reducing the sublime to the prosaic, immensity to infinitesimality, and vice versa (the trick can only work both ways). Everything in our universe is essentially flotsam or jetsam, rubbish heaps of fragments and shards, a 'pile of voodoo dolls and iron scrap in the backyard for the meek to inherit.' We, especially, are jerry-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 infinite amount of hope in the universe, just not for us. At least, I would venture for coldest comfort, not as we have constituted ourselves. When Ryan has the penny slot yell 'What even am I, by god?’ toward the high stakes room, the soul chills and thrills at being so seen. New Threats suggests that maybe, just maybe, something like redemption is possible, but only once we’re entirely emptied out and hawked in toto down at Walden Pawn.”—Nathan Salsburg, April 2025