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.”

    That careful choice of location is heard and felt throughout each of the ten tracks. The Gentle Guest didn’t just capture the sounds of instruments, they captured the sounds of them filling whole houses. Banjos and guitars ring with clarity while brass and woodwinds fill bedrooms, beaten drums and vocal chants echo down hallways and an upright bass booms its way across floors. “Each space sort of lends its own specific feel to the recording,” Rykal says, a trait that helps give We Are Bound... some of its rustic mystery.

Playing the new songs live has been a bit of a chore for the band, if not for trying to recreate the feeling of the album, than just for the simple task of fitting all the members and instruments on stage. “We’ve had upwards of 8 or 9 people,” says Rykal. “We wanted it to be some sort of rowdy, theatrical spectacle. We figured having a ton of people on stage was the easiest way to accomplish that.”

The band’s latest challenge to prepare for is gearing up and dwindling down for a tour this fall. For the sake of simplicity in numbers, The Gentle Guest will travel with only half of its members, which means that those five will need to find a way to play the music that ten once did. The band welcomes the challenge, though, and looks forward to figuring out their next steps.

“The best thing for me about The Gentle Guest is the fact that I get to play music with some of my closest friends,” says Rykal, “and the cast of characters is always changing. It’s the change that keeps it interesting.”

    The Gentle Guest (CD release) + The Nick Jaina Band + Laarks. Saturday, Sept. 20 at 7pm at the Grand Little Theatre, 102 W. Grand Ave. $6. ALL AGES. www.myspace.com/thegentleguest.