★★★★★
On his second full-length, Chicago-based guitarist and singer/songwriter Ryley Walker continues to draw inspiration from the most virtuosic finger-pickers and vocalists of the late '60s and early '70s. Walker impresses with his ability to effortlessly meld knotty psych, hard bop sway, and convincingly gritty blues riffs into single compositions, but the fact that he does so without any degree of affectation is perhaps even more admirable...
- www.undertheradarmag.com
2015-05-27
★★★★★
I listen to a lot of music.A LOT. (Just ask my wife...). I'm constantly looking for something new, something fresh. Boy did I ever find that with this record. A while ago the brilliant guitarist Daniel Bachman mentioned on Facebook that soon Ryley Walker would release some music that would blow everyone away. He was right. Ryley Walker is a 25 year old guitarist with an old soul, and he has crafted one of the most brilliant, unexpected and magical albums I've ever heard...
- www.ink19.com
2015-04-23
★★★★★
?????????? Ryley Walker is not ashamed of the bevy of influences who inform his sound. Primrose Green - his third solo album - finds the folksy singer/songwriter fully embracing the weight of those heavy hitters on his own sound, right down to the early 70s Van Morrison cover art. The success of the album is due in no small part to the breadth of styles that the young songwriter has heard and that are so clearly at the back of his mind - the Fender Rhodes of Joni Mitchell's Miles of Aisles;...
- www.glidemagazine.com
2015-04-20
★★★★★
Ryley Walker is not of this time. Drawing likely comparisons to Tim Buckley, John Martyn and Adrian Legg for his fingerpicked folk guitar style, Walker's sophomore LP, Primrose Green, is less a collection of songs than it is a series of esoteric compositions culled from the ether of yore. Like recently unearthed gems from Gary Higgins and Vashti Bunyan, Primrose Green is a flashback that will not soon wither with age, no matter its immediate reception...
- www.popmatters.com
2015-04-03
★★★★★
RYLEY WALKER - Primrose Green
Album:
Primrose Green
Artist: Ryley Walker
Label: Dead Oceans
Release Date: March 31, 2015
http://deadoceans.com/
BY MICHAEL TOLAND
There's considerable danger in frontloading a critical assessment of an artist's work with comparisons to innovative ancestors, but it can also be impossible to deny...
- blurtonline.com
2015-04-04
★★★★★
That Ryley Walker appears to embody the determined, shaggy-haired guitar artiste of the austere folk '70s is only one of his endearments. The fact that the breadth of his musicianship actually matches the persona--steeped as it is in both the minimalist traditions of Chicagoland experimental jazz and the fingerpicking wizardry of primitive guitar folk heroes like Glenn Jones--paints Walker as a real-deal revivalist of the most unironic order...
- www.pastemagazine.com
2015-04-01
★★★★★
In his quarter-century, Ryley Walker seems to have made definitive decisions about what qualifies as a worthy influence: Van Morrison records made between 1968 and 1974, Jackson C. Frank, Pentangle, and the recently reissued early works of Mike Cooper are all among the examples. On Primrose Green, he embraces those inspirations without wrestling with them. He lugs their aged weight around as signs of good taste and his self-proclaimed place in a historical lineage...
- pitchfork.com
2015-03-30
★★★★★
Chicago native Ryley Walker has been perfecting his anglophile brand of fingerpicking acoustic folk since 2007, a clutch of promising early cassette releases presaging 2013's well-received debut
- recordcollectormag.com
2015-03-26
★★★★★
Bert Jansch (and Pentangle), Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, John Martyn, Tim Hardin... these are just some of the ghosts that haunt the fringes of Primrose Green, the excellent second album from Chicago guitarist and songwriter Ryley Walker. Whilst his debut showed promise, not least in his tumbling, cascasing acoustic guitar playing, Primrose Green performs an impressive double stunt in better showcasing both his songwriting and singing on one hand, and his ambition to create something looser, freer...
- www.musicomh.com
2015-03-25
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