Pictured: “I specifically asked for anything but flower print wallpaper.”
“I knew I wanted it to be rowdy,” says Eric Rykal, the man behind [Eau Claire, Wisconsin’s] dirty blues/folk carnival known as The Gentle Guest. “For the first time in my life I was going to play music that was fun for the listener….I wanted to shout and scream and stomp and yell.”
That he did on his band’s sophomore album, “We Are Bound to Save Some Souls Tonight,” which is due for a release on Amble Down Records on the last day of September. It’s nearly a complete departure from the five songs on “Our Little Ruckus,” the group’s soft and careful debut EP from almost a year ago. This time around, Rykal and friends slur through their new full length with a barrage of rustic and drunken Americana tunes, each tinted and twisted by a love for gospel songs, field hollers and old-timey delta blues.
“I felt like this music had some profound sense of time and place that I hadn’t found anywhere else,” says the 21 year old songwriter of the inspiration he found from vintage folk records. “We tried to take the music from that time and place and bring it to this time and place. We made it a little rowdier, a little darker and a little noisier.”
This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for Volume One Magazine. Please visit their brand-spanking-new website, volumeone.org, to read it in its entirety.
The Gentle Guest - Down At The Sill
Down at the Still is the frantically fantastic single from We Are Bound….
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