The Black Ryder is a band out of time. It’s not just that their own music is heavily indebted to specific and identifiable sounds and eras from the past—that describes 95% of all bands working today. It’s more that their particular combination of influences has actually had several waves of revivalism, so it’s hard to know which version they are drawing from. The band’s 2010 full-length debut, Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride, was situated in a dreamy nu-Paisley Underground sphere that was, at that moment, quite fashionable. Mazzy Star had been gone for a long time, and bands like Tamaryn, Widowspeak, and the Black Ryder were carrying their torch in different ways. The latter, a band fronted by Australians Aimee Nash and Von Ryper (they’ve since relocated to Los Angeles), took the group’s languid ballads and reverbed mystery and scuffed it up with JAMC distortion, and they showed a sure hand with the particulars even if the songs weren’t terribly memorable. For their ambitious follow-up, The Door Behind the Door, the Black Ryder burrow deeper, directly engaging with the '60s and early-'70s sources that inspired it all.
Inevitably, that sort of engagement implies a certain grandiosity. You take a song like, say, the Rolling Stones’ "Shine a Light", and you know it comes from an era when both the musicians and the audience were comfortable with the idea that rock stars should strive for something profound and sublime. For those playing rock music, that sometimes meant tapping into the textures of black gospel, specifically, adding a chorus at just the right moment to take the rootsy earthiness of the musical form and send it to the heavens.
Midway through The Door Behind the Door is a song called "Throwing Stones", which begins with a strummed acoustic guitar playing a resigned refrain and then builds, piece by piece, to a climax where massed voices are singing "Let your love shine on/ If you want to be free." It’s almost shocking in its pompousness, in part because the Black Ryder are, after all, a smaller independent band, and you don’t expect them to be making gestures that presumably cost a certain amount of money to get right. But there is also something admirable about the initiatve, that they are going for it to this degree.
There are many details on The Door Behind the Door that the Black Ryder get right, which, with music like this, is an accomplishment in itself. The moaning feedback drone in "Seventh Moon" has the gorgeousness of a Neil Halstead lead, "Let Me Be Your Light" has a candy-kissed psychedelic swirl, strings and all, that serves as the perfect backdrop for Nash’s whispery vocals, and "Until the Calm of Dawn" brings to mind the acid-fried Disneyfications of prime Mercury Rev, with a twinkly music box set against a sweeping orchestral arrangement. The band loves the strings so much they close with "(Le Dernier Sommeil) The Final Sleep", a cinematic 12-minute instrumental coda that brings to mind beautifully-shot imagery that makes you feel like you should probably be feeling something.
Spiritualized is another band that has been down this particular road, but something about the fact that Jason Pierce’s obsessions with drugs, death, and religion had years to marinate makes it easier for him to get away with Wagnerian bombast. Coming from a band like the Black Ryder, where they know the sound and the history but don’t offer much in terms of personality, it’s harder not to fixate entirely on the formal elements of the music, rather than the things that might make it personal. That leads to records where you listen to and admire them from a distance instead of getting immersed in them.
