RYAN DAVIS & THE ROADHOUSE BAND - "New Threats from the Soul" 2xLP

Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band - New Threats from the Soul 2xLP (Sophomore Lounge, 2025) “If you don’t know it yet, it’s my privilege to tell you that Ryan Davis is one of the greatest songwriters of his generation. Bold instinct immediately insists that I lose the qualifications: he’s the greatest of his generation, he’s one of the greatest ever. Whatever. Posterity—if there is a posterity—will sort it out. Happily, New Threats from the Soul has beaten the Doomsday Clock to the wire, and we appear to have a little while left to revel in it, receive its revelations, and be revealed by it. “Do I know what I’m doing,” A.R. Ammons muses in his Tape for the Turn of the Year, “or am I waiting for it to be done?” That fundamental question seems to me to be the bedrock upon which New Threats is built. It reckons mightily with the perplexities of human efficacy and agency, of acting versus being acted upon, in an absurd and debased world. The “I” of Ryan’s songs is both schlemiel and schl