After that came the night’s sprawling centerpiece, “Sullen Mind,” which we first heard at Le Poisson Rouge back in June. The band began with “The Roundabout,” a fitting metaphor for a song about possibilities that can just as easily turn into inertia. What followed that introduction was a sprawling, hour-plus set consisting of just four songs, all of them non-album material, two of them brand new to us. Ryley said at the outset that he and his band didn’t deserve to be headlining over such company, and even if that wasn’t necessarily true, they certainly were the young guns among their peers. folk musician Bob Brown, playing his first show in 30 years. As followers of this site know, we’ve seen him a slew of times since that Hopscotch show, each revealing new songs and new dimensions of his style.įitting, then, that Ryley and his band would headline Tompkins Square’s tenth-anniversary celebration, at the top of a bill that also featured living legend Michael Chapman and the rediscovered D.C. From there, things moved fast, with Walker blowing our minds at a full-band appearance at Hopscotch, releasing his second album, Primrose Green, in 2015 (and a live album with Bill MacKay in August), and ending up on the roster of, among others, the Pitchfork Music Festival, Levitation, and Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival. The biggest single breakout, though, might be Ryley Walker, of Chicago, whose debut album the label released back in 2014. But on the first side of that slate - current artists - is where Tompkins Square has stood out the most, offering up records by Daniel Bachman, Shawn David McMillen, and last year’s Grammy-nominated set of music from respected folk singer Alice Gerrard. For the past decade, Tompkins Square Records has pursued the dual missions of enlightening listeners about the current state of folk and guitar music, as well as unearthing underappreciated classics, such as John Hulburt’s Opus III, compilations of gospel songs, and Harry Taussig’s Fate Is Only Once.
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