Charl Ry – On A Walk

Charl Ry – On A Walk – Album Review

“What have I done to deserve this flat, flavorless Manhattan?”

Leftovers!  How fucking dare you?!?  Are you going On A Walk, or taking us all along for a wank?

You see Charl Ry?  “I can say what I want” to as well, biatch.

Comin’ in HOT over here…perhaps I’ll dial it back…maybe.  Back when this album originally popped into my inbox about a month ago, I read somewhere in my notes that On A Walk was essentially a mixtape record, with the caveat being that CR had no idea what a mixtape was.  So take that tidbit of information however you’d like to.  With the release of On A Walk being so close in proximity to the guy’s last album, The Obscure Toil Dance, I figured this new set would just be whole bunch of B-sides that didn’t make the lineup of the last record.  No ACTUAL judgements here…I’ve proudly fucked with B-side albums throughout my entire life, long and hard to the point where they should need a cigarette.  Cheers to you, Smashing Pumpkins.  Pisces Iscariot ended up being one of their best records in my opinion, and if that’s what leftovers can yield, then I’m all fuckin’ for it, you feel me?  No pressure at all here Charl Ry.

While it did feel like the guitar in the opening track had a very familiar feel to it, to be fair to myself, I’ve heard a metric ton of this guy’s music…so maybe I’m just getting my wires crossed.  To be fair to him, he’s probably made more than I’ve heard…so like…I mean yeah, ideas, sounds, styles…these things tend to have some overlap throughout the course of a career no matter what the moniker is on the merch or  the letterhead says.  I will say this though – I really liked “Talk Is Inexpensive.”  I like the mysterious, almost creepy way that the verses of this song work, which is the part that felt more familiar to me.  The chorus has a genuinely remarkable transition that changes the whole vibe in a way, but the fact that it still seems to possess a singular, cohesive vibe ends up being one of the more impressive accomplishments at the very beginning to this new record from Ry.  I also really like what he’s done with his vocals here too…there’s like…some kind of filter or effect applied I think.  Could be EDGE.  Are you edging us, bro?  He bloody well could be.  Whatever it is, I like it, and for a guy that has one of the most distinct vocal sounds I’ve ever heard in my lifetime of listening, I’d highly recommend he continues to explore doing this kind of stuff, because that can really open the door to more unique combinations in what he creates, and can always provide the opportunity to use the vocals more like another instrument within the music.  In any event though, “Talk Is Inexpensive” is solid stuff…no real weaknesses that I can hear, and it’s the kind of opening track that allows the rest of the lineup to build on what he’s started.

“I Go On A Walk.”  What is this?  Are we fucking Randy Newman now?  Are you Jimmy Fallon, slow jamming the news for us?  I just took a shit before writing this review.  You see the slippery slope we’re on?  If we’re just sharing basic-bitch details with each other, I’ma hit you with both barrels, every time.  He’s not edging us here in this second tune, he’s fucking NOODLING this time.  Plodding along, like he’s got all the damn time in the world, and we’re all going to be content to sit and listen with HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF OTHER SONGS out there waiting to be clicked on.  How’s THAT for hubris?  I’m such a jerk calling him out like this…especially when I’d probably tell you that I might like this track even more than the opening tune.  The way that second guitar part chimes in through the hooks is worth the price of admission…the backing vocals possesses that “Ignoreland” textured sound to them…and TRUTHFULLY, I actually love the fact that he’s moving at the pace he feels like moving – shouldn’t that be what it’s like to go on a walk?  It’s fucking thematically relevant.  You could totally make an argument that Charl had an idea, went after the right way to present a meandering, unhurried sound to pair with it, and ended up with a concept song that completely hit the mark of the intentions in its design from start to finish.  Maybe that’s me giving him way too much credit, or maybe that’s what actually happened…who knows?  What I can tell you for certain is that there are tangible hooks in this cut much stronger than you’d think.  In fact, I bet every time this motherfucker goes on a walk this song is legitimately in his head with every step he takes now.  If you WANT that to be YOUR life too from here on in, be sure to listen to this song!

“Big equation, little brain,” he sings.  Small idea, drawn-out song, I sing back to him in a clearly CLEVER retort.  I have to be real with you…I really don’t hate these tunes at all, though I can appreciate that a lot of this lineup would be a tougher sell to the masses, given how stripped down and bare-arsed they are.  There’s not a whole lot goin’ on other than a man and his guitar, save for a few smart ideas on how to go about mixing them in production & whatnot…but again, if I’m being real with you, it’s working out.  I’ve got love for “Big Equation” – moments like this are wonderfully hypnotic, and I highly encourage you all to put this track on repeat to let it work that magic on you.  Soon enough, a half hour will have flown right by and you’ll realize you’re still listening to a song that was only ever a tiny 2:17 in length.  Is this an easy tune for Charl Ry to create?  I’m sure it is.  Does that matter?  No it does not…at least, not to me.  I’m all about simple recipes like this and the refinement that comes along with it.  “Big equation, little brain,” he sings.  Barely music, perfect track, I sing back to him, basically kicking ALL THE ASS with the comments I’m making here throughout this review.  For real though, put this track on repeat…you’ll find it loops around seamlessly and you can really get into this song as much as you should.  Lyrically he’s got some great things to say here as well if you’re reading between the lines, but I’ll let you all handle that as best you can.  He might not have much in faith in us decoding his messages, mind you, given the scale of the equation & how our brains are so tiny by comparison…but try anyway, you feeble human minds.

“Amaze, amaze, amaze!” – Rocky.  That’s all I could think of when I got to “Like A Maze,” and yet, this is not that…not at all.  This track was the tougher one in the set for me so far to this point…ideas-wise, it’s an A…production-wise, I’m unsure as to what grade to assign it.  I’ll put it to you this way – I felt like I had to turn this track up, and I didn’t sign up for doing physical tasks while I’m listening here with my feet up on my desk trying to relax and pretend that music journalism is in fact, a “big boy” job.  So…all that being said…when you do turn this track up a little…obviously you can hear it that much better…but I’m still not 100% sure this one didn’t come out a bit over-compressed or something.  On the one hand, I love how there’s not an ounce of ambient sound in the mix and the clarity of the instrumentation is truly outstanding…but on the other hand, it feels like “Like A Maze” can’t really breathe either, if that makes sense to ya.  All the ideas are rock solid…I love the distance in the vocals…the guitar melody is spot-on – “Like A Maze” also has the intricate musicianship of Charl Ry on display for ya…but it all sounds like it was recorded with a towel over the microphone.  He makes references to dreams and such here though, so again, maybe on a thematic level having this track feel a lot more hazy, like the sound is coming to you through the fog in the ether…like a memory you’re trying to recall or make clearer to your mind, maybe that’s exactly what he was going for.  Credit where credit is due if he was, because he achieved that.  Sadly, there are about two other listeners besides myself that might understand that.  Most folks are just going to reach for the volume knob and complain about having to turn this song up and the fact that, despite the isolated clarity, it sounds like it was recorded through an old jerk sock.

He is…really trying to sink right into the back of the tin can he’s recording in.  Where “Like A Maze” felt like it was withdrawn, “Punchline” seeks to go even further into the distance.  Having these two tracks back-to-back might be what makes this record feel like a collection of B-sides, leftovers, or a mixtape of sorts for listeners out there…but I appreciate it.  I might rant about this or rant about that, but at the end of the day, I like what I’m hearing, so don’t be fooled by my bullshit.  On A Walk has a real atmosphere to it – I mean, hell, when you’re listening to “Punchline” you might go as far as feeling like this is Charl Ry’s own Nebraska, weird as that comparison might seem to be at first.  When you consider the sound of the recordings and the way these ideas are all stripped back to their bare-assed essence, I think you’ve gotta appreciate the closeness & accuracy that particular comparison displays.  Tracks like “Punchline” sound like the voice in your head that speaks to you throughout the day…gently affirming what you observe in the world, but again, like it’s drifting in on the ether of memory, or like your conscience talking to you.  It’s the Jiminy Cricket of songs…that’s what I’m getting at, clearly.  I’m sure you realized that by now.  In the strangest of ways, I really found myself loving how listening to “Punchline” reminded me of listening to music on one of the first ghetto blasters I used to listen to way back in the day when I was a kid and I was experimenting with the balance.  There’s like, no low-end to “Punchline” whatsoever, so you end up with this totally treble-up, tin-like sound to it…and I’m truly all for it.  I mean, it wouldn’t work for every tune you’d ever create, but in the in the context of an album built like this, “Punchline” belongs here.

“Some Ignorance?”  Pfff.  Fuck these half-measures, I’m ALL IGNORANCE over here, bruh.  I think the man glossed over the biggest hook in this song if I’m being completely real with ya, but I won’t hold that against him…there’s still enough of it in this tune to keep me satisfied.  It probably isn’t what you’d think it is anyhow.  T’ain’t comin’ from the vocals, I can assure you that.  It’s the lead guitar…the one that is once again NOODLING around, doin’ what it does without a care in the world…like, LISTEN to how much of a contribution it makes to what you hear around the thirty-five second mark!  We don’t get quite that much of that specific piece coming back, but the lead is still back there NOODLING around in a way that is close enough to keep me happy…though I’d take more of what we hear around thirty-five seconds in if he was willing to supply it.  Clearly, he was not…so we have to take what we can get.  I mean…around the 2:35 mark…maybe there’s a snippet there you can feel similarly about…what I’m saying though, is that this tiny little unassuming fragment of a song, was actually the piece he really should have built the whole damn thing around.  “Some Ignorance,” he claims!  Takes a lot more than some to just cruise right by that hook without making it the main featuring dude…just saying.  The rest surrounding these sparing magical moments is all good enough…Charl Ry is getting his “existential dread on,” and a lot of what he’s yammering on about is highly relevant for what’s happening out there in the world right now, and relatable to how many of us are feeling.  Ignorance and existential dread…tell me you don’t want some of THAT, right?  Who listens to music to escape all that?  Fuck that, I want to be DEVASTATED by the things I’m listening to, so thank you CR, for being so willing to supply that of which I was trying so hard to run away from.  Now I can sit here in my misery, waiting for the bombs to go off and WWIII to start.

Maybe he just doesn’t care about how we’d feel…maybe that’s what it has been all along.  Maybe he’s content to simply dangle his musical nuts on our chin like a form of audible tea-bagging, without really letting us feel the full weight of what’s in his sack, you know what I mean?  So like, where he’ll tease us with a glimpse of greatness in the music hooks you’d hear in a song like “Some Ignorance,” or the vocals on “Going Outside” where he’s specifically singing about “Going Outside” for a way-too-BRIEF moment – maybe he’s well aware of what universal sound is, and is deciding to be FULLY ignorant by not letting us have MORE of that.  I suspect he comes by it naturally, because he’s usually writing his songs backwards with the words first before the music…but like…have a listen to yourself brother-man!  Hear those spots where you’ve created something undeniably potent and filled with universal melody, and get the fuck back in the lab to rewrite and EXPLOIT THAT SHIT like the rest of the music world would do, will ya?  I’m tired of this take-what-I-can-get situation you’ve put me in, Charl Ry.  I want to eat the whole damn pie, and you’re constantly cutting me a smaller slice inspired by some cruel-ass diet that I did NOT sign up for.  Ultimately, “Going Outside” is an acoustic guitar tune that actually meets somewhere in the middle of being Charl Ry’s own “Uninvited,” crossed with just about any of the softer tunes in the Collective Soul catalog.  I’d be enticed into listening to something described like that, so there, I said it…and I guess now, you listen.

The largest departure in this set is probably its final track, “My Darling.”  We’re not talking about the extremes of something like, say, “Swing On This” at the end of Jar Of Flies by Alice In Chains…but it did feel like this last cut just barely attached itself to the fringe of what this record was sounding like.  I think it’s a fair addition in the sense that, for a bunch of acoustic-based tunes, a lot of On A Walk also feels highly experimental at the same time…so…yeah…I mean, it fits, even it’s only by a C-hair.  It’s the song equivalent of a person that’s running to catch the bus as it’s pulling out from the stop, and Charl Ry is the equivalent of the driver kind enough to stop and let it on.  I liked that “My Darling” was different, how about that?  Does that make it my go-to track from On A Walk?  No.  No it does not.  I think the hooks he’s got in the music are super cool to listen to, but I couldn’t say that I could vouch for it being something I’d be interested in every single day.  Like, there will be specific times where I’d absolutely want to reach for “My Darling,” and I’ll be happy to remember it’s there for me when I do – but I guess that’s the difference for me between this last cut and the rest of the lineup surrounding it.  For the most part, I felt like I could zone right out in listening to On A Walk, but “My Darling” kept snapping me out of my sonic zombielike bliss, because the uniqueness kind of demands that from us as we listen.  It is what it is, as they say…you serve me leftovers, and you bet your ass I’m going to pick through them for the stuff I like best.  I admire the ambitious design and quirky ideas fueling the strangely soulful, yet weirdly disconnected dreamy vibes of this final track…it might not be my favorite of the set, but it’s still a damn good tune that likely isn’t going to be comparable to much of anything on your playlist right now.  There’s always value in uniqueness, even if it takes longer for the listening ears to catch up to it.  You could use a lot of words to describe the musical mind of Charl Ry at the end of the day, and unique is definitely one of them.  Special works too, depending on the slant you put on its emphasis.  I’d also accept absurd, or ‘one you’d find at the back of the class,’ or SUPERSONIC EDGELORD…he’s all these things, and presumably more…click play and find out for your own damn self.

Or don’t.  You don’t have to listen to me, my (incredible) suggestions, or agree with what I think about anything – I’m not your dad.

Find more of the things Charl does when he be Charl’n, at Apple Music here:  https://music.apple.com/us/artist/charl-ry/1848217363

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