Music For The End Of The World: At home with William Ryan Fritch
(photos: Estefany Gonzalez) William Ryan Fritch wants to talk about his daughter. “I promise this is the only Dad video I’m going to show you,” he says one long afternoon at his place. His daughter, nine-month-old Wilder, is napping in the other room, which is in another building. He lives in an old water tower in the outer hills of Petaluma, on a winding country road where there’s space enough between houses to make San Francisco developers weep for the unused acreage. It’s a little rural, but there's still reception. So he pauses to play a video of a blonde [...]
Best of the Rest – February 2015 (Six Organs of Admittance, bAd bAd, Panic Is Perfect, & more)
Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance (Photo Credit: Drag City) Every month, our editors hear lots of great new music, at shows around the Bay, exploring the far reaches of the Interwebs, and sifting through the veritable deluge of emails from artists and publicists around the globe hawking the latest songs and videos. While we’d love to write about everything that catches our ear, it’s impossible – there’s just too much good music out there. This is an attempt at rounding up the latest and greatest that we didn't have the bandwidth to cover throughout the month – the [...]
William Ryan Fritch drops “Thankless Deeds” video
My colleague Jason has been keeping you posted on Oakland songwriter, composer, and our new favorite person, William Ryan Fritch, since Fritch wowed us with his Heavy EP last October. Now, check out the super-spooky video for his latest release (which, in true Fritchy fashion, comes hot on the heels of his last single), "Thankless Deeds." Kinda-sorta NSFW, unless your office is cool with slightly-obscured nudity. Fritch is a multi-instrumentalist with an impressive catalog who has scored films and contributed to television shows and theater productions. His newest LP, Revisionist, is due out February 10. This should be the last [...]
Listen to “In Denial”, new track off William Ryan Fritch’s forthcoming Revisionist
William Ryan Fritch’s seemingly never-ending onslaught of releases for Leave Me Sessions subscription series continues with a new LP entitled Revisionist, due February 10 via Lost Tribe Sound. In anticipation of that new album, he's streaming the album's first single "In Denial" now. "In Denial", like all of the talented Mr. Fritch's music, is a rich and soaring soundscape that envelops the listener in a beautiful ethereal haze. Bolstered by Fritch's lilting voice, the track tackles Revisionist’s central theme of, well, revisionism – "how we forget evil, distort it, skim past it, papering over those aspects of history we find [...]
William Ryan Fritch announces new record Revisionist, next in Leave Me Sessions subscription series
William Ryan Fritch has been nothing if not over-the-top prolific during 2014, and it looks like 2015 will bring more of the same. Revisionist, the next installment in his Leave Me Sessions subscription series, is due February 10, 2015 via Lost Tribe Sound, and he shared the first new track off that upcoming release, a track entitled "Heavy" that finds itself moving deftly between the calamitous and the gentle. As we told you last month, Fritch plans to release ten albums as part of the Leave Me Sessions, and Revisionist is number eight in that series (the first seven were [...]
William Ryan Fritch releases ‘Heavy’ EP, Death Blues’ ‘Ensemble’
Music writers – including yours truly – throw around the words epic, ethereal, and soundscape quite a bit. Anything that's somewhat amorphous and presents an aura of openness and grandness is immediately slapped with one or more of these labels, allowing the journo to convey how stirring the music truly is, as well as the idea that music – even without words – can tell an emotional story. Well, William Ryan Fritch’s music cannot and will not escape these descriptors. In fact, the perfect way to describe his August release, an enchanting EP entitled Heavy, is that it's chock full [...]