The Gentle Guest

    Change is one of the most intimidating terms looming in a musician’s mind. The thought of exploring new musical territories is always tempting, but the idea of failure after making the wrong move is terrifying, and everywhere the curse of the sophomore slump haunts.

    “I knew I wanted it to be rowdy,” says Eric Rykal, the man behind the dirty blues/folk carnival known as The Gentle Guest. “For the first time in my life I was going to play music that was fun for the listener. ... I wanted to shout and scream and stomp and yell.”

    That he did on his band’s sophomore album, We Are Bound to Save Some Souls Tonight, which is due for a release on Amble Down Records at the end of September. It’s nearly a complete departure from the five songs on “Our Little Ruckus,” the group’s soft and careful debut EP from almost a year ago. This time around, Rykal and friends slur through their new full length with a barrage of rustic and drunken Americana tunes, each tinted and twisted by a love for gospel songs, field hollers and old-timey delta blues.

    “I felt like this music had some profound sense of time and place that I hadn’t found anywhere else,” says the 21-year-old songwriter of the inspiration he found from vintage folk records. “We tried to take the music from that time and place and bring it to this time and place. We made it a little rowdier, a little darker, and a little noisier.”

    Rykal, who owns and runs his own local studio, did the recording himself with help from a long list of friends and musicians from the Chippewa Valley. “We recorded the album in several locations,” he says, “which I personally love to do. We did most the tracking in basements and in living rooms.”