Resist the urge to laugh at Skinny Dyck — the playful alias of western Canadian artist Ryan Dyck (or don’t, that’s kind of the idea). New album Easygoing (out Oct 25 via Victory Pool) sees Dyck moving a few steps further away from the country music environs he once wholly inhabited, but fear not, twang fans: rather than replacing that sound wholesale, he and his studio collaborators have instead created their own hybrid approaches. There is a pleasing straightforwardness to the music of Skinny Dyck. His voice is clean and clear (and usually nestled in a bed of lush reverb), the songs are held together with spacious instrumentation and smart, tasty hooks (including Dyck’s signature pedal steel work), and the band is right on the money, everything in its right place and not a note wasted. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, however: co-producer and bassist Aladean Kheroufi (a multi-faceted musician and songwriter in his own right) applied some of the old school, minimalist recording techniques he picked up while interning at Daptone Records years ago, and he has been at the core of Skinny’s live band (alongside drummer Clayton Smith) for the last handful of years. So when Dyck and Kheroufi hit the basement to lay down these songs, it was as easy as slipping into a pair of old jeans. And that sprightly, jazz-inflected lead guitar work comes courtesy of Winnipeg’s Austin Parachoniak, who helped bring a whiff of Merle Haggard’s ’80s band to the mix. Easygoing follows hot on the heels of 2022’s Palace Waiting, which “distilled the spirit of wide-cut country,” according to Exclaim!. Easygoing sees Dyck moving a few steps further away from the country music environs he once wholly inhabited, but fear not, twang fans: rather than replacing that sound wholesale, he and his studio collaborators have instead created their own hybrid approaches. Or, as Dyck puts it, “I still like to collect my mail at the old shack off the highway, but I no longer want to live there exclusively.” Easygoing had its finishing touches applied by the prime candidate for the role, celebrated mix engineer Mark Nevers, whose credit list is a veritable who’s who of fresh, forward thinking songwriters and bands that exist in the between-genre sphere. Artists such as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Silver Jews, Calexico, Andrew Bird, Bill Callahan, and Lambchop have benefited from Nevers’ touch, a blend of his trusted ears and vintage analog gear. As a mixer who began working in the traditional Country & Western scenes and slowly gravitated to the more expansive world of indie music, Nevers was a fitting choice for the job. And this notion of “country but not” courses through Easygoing in a pretty tangible way, its success partially measured by how unnoticeable it is. Take “Nosedive” for example – what might be one of the album’s more traditional “boots kickin’ up dust” kind of song features a deeply psychedelic spoken word outro, with enigmatic vocals bubbling through a thick web of analog delay; it’s truly a unique blend of approaches – and it works. Elsewhere, things continue to pair nicely, with conga drums undercutting sparkling lead guitar and the occasional synth flourish, and “Lean In” features a delicious bass line that sounds as if it was plucked straight from a vintage James Jamerson-played Motown track. The combination of the band’s cool chug and Dyck’s classic songwriting moves on title track “Easygoing” recall the endless-horizon feel of classic War on Drugs, another band who’ve managed to successfully infuse the familiar with a jolt of something new.
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Equal parts balladeer, crooner and pop star, Aladean Kheroufi is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, arranger, producer, recordist and DJ. Canadian by way of Algeria. He writes songs that are idiosyncratic, soulful and devastating, with a glass half-full optimism that turns heartbreak into melancholy party anthems. Aladean has been described as a veteran of “making it work’ accustomed to recording in improvised spaces with microphones either borrowed or purchased below market value. With a sound that tends to favour minimalism like the confidence of the quietest parts of Curtis Mayfield’s, LIVE! or the faux-simplicity of Sunny Ozuna’s genre-bending Tear Drop and Key-Loc output. Yet somehow Aladean’s songs don’t sound old, they sound comfortably made today with respect to the music of the past. His last single “LOVE! … (is the answer) b/w Every Girl” was released February 2022 to critical acclaim, with his much anticipated debut LP Studies In A Dying Love (released in June 2024 via We Are Busy Body).
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