Editor’s Note: Here at No Depression there’s too much great roots music in a year for us to cover it all. So in December, when new releases slow down, we ask writers to review some of the best albums we missed throughout the year in an on-going series called What We Missed.
On his sophomore album, New Threats from the Soul, Ryan Davis and his Roadhouse Band boldly ask the question: What if the working man was a huge van of Kurt Vonnegut and probably listened to Ester Perel’s podcast? In structuring his songs, Davis loves to start with the building blocks of some near-distant past iteration of country music, and then layer in the unexpected. That might be a random flute or theremin solo, or a smattering of computer-generated beats that sound like the Postal Service circa 2003, mingling alongside a steel guitar and his deep, low-pitched bass voice that rumbles around like radio signals bouncing across the American plains on a clear, dark night.
Davis' lyrics play in the same ballpark of tone as Father John Misty, flirting with smart ass and far too long to fit into the country pattern of straightforwardness. Rather, this is a collection of pop culture references, lined with existential questions that interrogate what Descartes might have meant by saying, “I think, therefore I am.” The existence of this project seems to be an examination of what a bar band is, or can be, in 2025. It toys with the simple things in life, including one called “The Simple Joy,” which examines whether finding simple happiness in a life as a blue-collar worker is even possible, or if it is an exercise in futility to examine what happiness even is.
