Albums
Revisionist
2015
Release Date: 2015
By Winston Cook-Wilson
Reviewed February 5, 2015
Oakland-based singer/songwriter William Ryan Fritch's new Revisionist serves as a culmination to a prolific recording period. The ballads that make up the album are equal parts melancholic, Americana-flavored pop and post-minimalist chamber music.
In recent years, Oakland-based singer/songwriter and one-man indie rock chamber orchestra William Ryan Fritch has been recording more music than your favorite mixtape rapper. Last spring, he began releasing a collection of 110+ songs in a fashion that is as decadent as the contained music itself: through an ongoing subscription service. is intended as the culmination of the series, and high rollers receive it on 140-gram vinyl inside a book of paintings. The ballads that make up the album are equal parts melancholic, Americana-flavored pop and percolating, post-minimalist chamber music. The action is staged in the kind of cathedral-sized space simulated on defining mid-'00s indie rock records like Beirut’s Gulag Orkestar or Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House; indeed, Fritch’s album could have reasonably been made during this period.