“I never asked to be born / I was only wondering where the door went to,” laments Ryan Davis wryly on ‘A Suitable Exit’. You see, Dancing On The Edge is a record about Big Things™. Existential angst, loneliness, loss – it’s a collection of songs that meditate on life, death and all the mess that surrounds it. But key to its dishevelled charm is Davis’ innate understanding about the ridiculousness of all this living, and the wit with which he delivers his hard-won wisdom.
Not that Davis thought he’d make an album like Dancing On The Edge – he was done with the exacting precision of “straightforward songwriting” and felt more excited by experimental electronic music. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been busy over the last few years, either. He’d been busy fronting State Champion, playing in Tropical Trash as well as the adventurous instrumental outfit Equipment Pointed Ankh, not to mention his own label Sophomore Lounge, running Technique Street (a distro for all sorts of underground sounds) as well as being co-founder of Cropped Out festival.
Yet he “slowly started circling back toward the unexpected desire to return to ‘song’ form with a clear and conditioned mind. It certainly didn’t come easy. It was painful, actually.” You can feel what it took to make this record – acutely so – as you listen to his first proper solo release under his own name; a seven-song double LP dense with ideas.
Nearly all of these intricate, intimate songs nudge the 10-minute mark; ideas and sounds weaving in and out. It’s packed with immensely quotable lyrics: whether it’s about approaching middle-age: “I’m doing 25-to-life just waiting on a friend to get back from a piss”. Struggles with alcohol: “I’ve seen the sunset, babe, through each and every shade of beer.” Or depression “there’s a blackened space between the back of my head and the back of my face”.
Throughout Davis faces this darkness with a Berman-esque wit (a highlight: “Constantine didn’t make Saturday night for sitting here acting like this”). There are the fingerprints of Bill Callahan here too, and his backing Roadhouse Band weave together pedal steel and rickety synths to create a loping soundtrack for this absurdist poetry. The loose arrangements and the unexpected breakdowns and changing time signatures add colour (particularly on the majestic ‘Flashes of Orange’) as songs build and swell.
You could call this alt country but it feels like a wildly inadequate phrase. What Dancing On The Edge is is a demonstration, brought to life by Davis’ unique voice. that there’s joy in all this messiness, a certain triumph in overcoming your demons.
