Bruce Sprinsteen had it. Will Oldham and Grant Lee Phillips have it still and folks like Willy Vlautin of Richmond Fontaine could practically cook by it. What do they have? That ability to kick up the dirt of American folklore and have it fall like magic dust on our hard, weary souls. They’re reanimators. Restorers. One hand strokes the course, taut wires of a bruised and battered six-string and the other hand applies CPR. Whatever respiratory problems we have, whatever difficulty we have in breathing is relieved by a shot of cheap and dirty adrenaline to our hearts, restoring a decent rhythm, perhaps a smile but always the peculiar sense that life could get a whole lot worse. And life getting a whole lot worse is something the raspy 36 year old Ryan knows plenty about having already lost his elder brother to a 30 year jail sentence and a close friend within the space of just a few years. In fact it was the hard, leathery hand of disaster that whipped 2006’s collaboration with Neilson Hubbard ‘Strays Don’t Sleep’ into shaped and gave Ryan his reputation as a battle-weary diehard, one half of his face lit by streetlights, the other half bearing the scars of a thousand barroom brawls and three days stubble. Remember when Springsteen said that the only redemption he could offer was from beneath that dirty hood of his? Well here redemption is offered by way of a dozen or tracks of grizzled lyrical magic, the idle purr of a six-string and the dirt he picks from his fingernails as he and an emsemble cast of ghosts, garbage collectors and girls drives us around a scrapyard of boulevards, setting suns, malls, broken TV sets, a heap of broken chords, a couple of favoured escape routes and a fistful of American dirt. Ryan defines a landscape blighted by heroism, relieved by foolishness, littered with drunks and rescued by stars. For a moment at least, Ryan, the band and all of us listening in, float somewhere above the trash cans and cars. And whilst it lasts, it makes standing on top of the landfill a really rather beautiful experience.
Produced by Doug Lancio, the album features Brian Bequette on electric slide guitar, guest vocals from Thad Cockerell and Kate York and the violins of Molly Thomas and Eamon McLoughlin.
Badly Drawn Boy loves him, writer Nick Hornsby loves him. Now it’s your turn to love him.
‘MATTHEW RYAN VS SILVER STATE’ – RELEASED 14.04.08