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.

1. The Grand Old Trout
2. Pretty Weeds Revisited
3. Lower Chestnut
4. Naturita
5. I Heard Them Singing
6. Stretching My Dollar In Plano
7. Lonesome Traveler
8. Dragonfly