The title track of Ryley Walker’s second album answers a question no one ever asked: how would it sound if Tim Buckley had written his own version of Afroman’s Because I Got High? The Primrose Green in question isn’t some village garden, but evidently some strain of weed with which Walker is spectacularly besotted – and that’s not the only thing that makes this album seem like a lost relic from 1970. The influence of Buckley is so clear that you feel like asking Walker to play Buzzin’ Fly just to get it out of his system, while the upright-bass sound is strongly reminiscent of Pentangle (given that Pentangle’s Danny Thompson played bass on Buckley’s Dream Letter live set, that’s pretty much the model here). Even when he strays from the jazz-folk path, Walker stays in period, as on the modal guitar instrumental Griffiths Buck Blues. There are diversions into relative modernity – such as the systems-like ending to Love Can Be Cruel, underlaid with fizzing feedback – but the presiding mood is a stoned, summery somnambulance. Derivative as it is, there’s beauty here, and something admirable in Walker’s insistence on so closely cleaving to his chosen path.
