JUNK-DRAWER HEART

Ryan Davis's wordy disquisitions on desire.

- BY AMANDA PETRUSICH

On Easter Sunday, the Louisville-based singer-songwriter Ryan Davis opened a matinée show for Bill Callahan in the assembly room of a former Catholic school in Kingston, New York. Indoor concerts during daylight hours can feel uncanny, maybe more so on a holy day—the doors opened at 2 P.M., and someone, possibly Callahan, had nestled colored plastic eggs amid the rows of folding chairs—but the vibe in the room was convivial, loose. Davis usually tours with the six-piece Roadhouse Band, but that afternoon he performed solo with his guitar, a melodica, a Roland sampler, a drum machine, a couple of effects pedals, a mixer, and a bass sequencer. Davis is a magnetic front man, and the Roadhouse Band is an intoxicatingly raucous live outfit, but the constraints of the setup suited his new material, which is suffused with listlessness and yearning, dark jokes and wordy disquisitions on desire. Something about Davis's onstage multitasking—cuing loops, switching between instruments—felt consonant with his discursive, country-tinged rock and roll, in which a lovely pedal-steel riff might be punctuated by a squall of synthesizer or a frantic breakbeat. Nothing is exactly where or what you expect it to be, and nothing stays still for very long.