Pro-dubbed, pro-printed audio cassette w/ fold-out j-card!

Tracklist:
1. However Called
2. Dearborn
3. Stronger Then
4. Put Upon
5. Outside Her
6. Allways
7. April March
8. A Nun
9. Everything is Free
10. I'm Alright
11. Tuckers Bark
12. Paean

Perpetual Doom presents Rail Sing, a retrospective collection from Ryan Sambol. Recorded in Nashville, Texas, Germany, and New York, between 2014 and 2018, these are songs published, lost, forgotten, and rediscovered—now available together on cassette for the first time. They follow Ryan’s work with The Strange Boys and Living Grateful, as well as his last solo record, Now Ritual, and look forward to his upcoming release: Gestalt.  
 
Maybe it’s an accident, a trick of the light, but each tune on Rail Sing yields a singular laconic magic. If this is a statement, a comprehensive glimpse of a particular moment in an artist’s career, it’s also a worn-through record of art held together by surprise. Life furnishes its own forms, and here Ryan is in discovery mode. From the first full-band tracks, recorded with The Interstate Group, to the gentle instrumental closer, these are songs for the valleys and peaks, the poor and put upon, the strongest things that make you weak. They look at the ways that time takes its toll, stockpiling a few regrets and pointing some fingers. Opening track “However Called” faces down the big decisions and quiet moments in a life spent making music, every yes, every no, and every “so?” “Dearborn” wraps some contemplation of uncertain origins and ultimate end in a vision of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. But because time can also be gentle, they all return to a kind of indolent praise. “I owe money all over town,” Ryan sings on “Stronger Than,” “but only small amounts.” Backed by his pals in The Interstate Group, whose accompaniment emphasizes each turn of phrase, every disparate feeling, Ryan paints these tunes with a golden hue.  
 
As much as Rail Sing documents a particular moment, the record's effect is to leave a hazy nostalgia. Is it those Texas evenings? The sound of that tape turning over? All those voices at the end of “Everything is Free”? The second half finds Ryan on his own but never alone, bringing warmth and atmosphere to tunes that express the determination to be independent, different, and singular. The same goes for the instrumentals “AprilMarch” and “A Nun,” which veer out of expected territory and into the open space Ryan explored in “After Lunch.” The final track, “Paean,” delivers all of this with a blessing. There is much to be grateful for already, but there is so much more to come. Rail Sing marks Ryan Sambol as a persistently unique and inventive artist. And if there’s still a bit of dust on these tunes, “Allways” puts it best: “He was going there always. He was going regardless of what you thought. Just let him do his thing.”