Album Review: Ryley Walker - Golden Sings That Have Been Sung

Just as you think you've worked out what Ryley Walker is about, he moves the goalposts — sometimes only slightly, but enough so you can't quite pin him down.

There's the currently fashionable indie-folk and pastoral-towards-hippie of I Will Ask You Twice, while the quietly stately piano of Funny Thing She Said adds an old school pop sensibility. Then the unspooling words and rich meanderings of The Halfwit In Me or The Roundabout head toward a kind of acoustic psychedelia. One plus point is having former Wilco multi-instrumentalist Leroy Bach directing these sometimes expansive conversations, so you end up with an album in which to lose yourself.