In an interesting pairing, Ryley Walker and Calexico shared the stage at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg April 28th. Walker delivered a hypnotic set to warm things up for the seven-piece band, bringing his heady guitar shredding to the crowd before they started the grooving and shaking that was to come. Walker’s boggy sound had the crowd in a trance, as it tends to do, with his deep vocals and dreamy guitar melodies. With his forthcoming new record Deafman Glance, Walker seems to be stepping away from his tendency to jam and moving toward a more polished, composed sound. Still, to see him live is to hear him jam and he was in his signature psych-folk-rock mashup prime on this particular evening.
Walker’s performance of the lead single “Telluride Speed” took us on a journey with plunges into dark quiet that suddenly morphed into elevated, floaty beams of light. Its composition on the record is far more intricate and layered, with wind instruments laying softly under his breathy, deep register. It’s a complex arrangement, as most of the songs on Deafman Glance are, proving Walker’s talents not only as a guitarist and songwriter, but as a composer. Other tunes in his set, “The Halfwit in Me” and “The Roundabout” off 2016’s Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, were equally enchanting and pastoral. If not their butts shaking, Walker got the crowd’s minds working.
When Calexico takes any stage, it’s always a little alarming at first just how many bodies and instruments there are to take in. You have multiple kinds of percussion – drums, bongos – plus keys, accordion, plenty of horns and guitars of all sorts. Their explosive set was just right for a Saturday night, and if you weren’t dancing, we weren’t in the same room. The crowd clapped along to favorites off the newer records The Thread That Keeps Us and Edge of the Sun like the soaring pop gem “End of the World With You” and the slinky, swaggering title track off the latter. The incredible feats of musicianship happening right before your eyes are almost surreal, and the sounds they create invite you into a whole different world – one that’s fully realized and filled with fiery magic.
