Walker, Ryley & Bill MacKay: SpiderBeetleBee (Vinyl LP)
Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker's inspired collaboration continues with a 2nd volume of freshly baked tunes: they call it, SpiderBeetleBee.
It's been nearly two years since their much-admired 2015 debut, Land Of Plenty (Whistler Records), and SpiderBeetleBee more than makes up for the long wait with a rich, resonant batch of performances that elevate the guitar duo's sound into an ever-widening panorama of styles. Their first album was developed over a month-long live residency at Chicago's Whistler, reflecting MacKay and Walker's joy in their newly found playing relationship. As kindred spirits, they found in their playing the ability to wordlessly finish a phrase or suggest a direction while speaking solely through their guitars.
SpiderBeetleBee continues fluidly through and beyond a similar path of psych-folk-blues-raga, brewing further explorations in mixed-and-matched idioms, turning composed melodies inside-out via improvisation, and finding in the blend a shared Walker / MacKay pasture, serendipitously located somewhere between Appalachia and the Highlands.
SpiderBeetleBee radiates forth with equal parts austerity and whimsy, as evidenced in the lead single 'I Heard Them Singing'. Generating a nimble tempo with the aid of MacKay's requinto (a kind of 5-string Mexican guitar), Walker's rolling chords and the percolating tabla of Ryan Jewell, 'I Heard Them Singing' suggests an unknown short-cut from Brazil to India.
Adorned with Bill MacKay's colorful and willfully primitive cover-art, SpiderBeetleBee wanders through styles, landmasses and hemispheres, capturing the further adventures of MacKay and Walker with spellbinding snapshots that only bloom larger the longer you take them in.
- The Grand Old Trout
- Pretty Weeds Revisited
- Lower Chestnut
- Naturita
- I Heard Them Singing
- Stretching My Dollar In Plano
- Lonesome Traveler
- Dragonfly