Emptied Animal is a 10 track EP, from US composer and multi instrumentalist William Ryan Fritch. Recently his main focus seems to have been film scores, including The Waiting Room, issued on Lost Tribe Sound last year. 2014 though heralds an outpouring of a ridiculous amount material, so much so that his label has introduced a William Ryan Fritch subscription series.
Emptied Animal is unique in that it is his first release to feature lyrical vocals since his initial recording from 2006, Plumed & Desiccated. With five vocal pieces and five instrumentals (mostly the same pieces devoid of vocals), his approach to vocals is to treat them as just another instrument, though they often ride triumphantly over the mix, leaving a trail of reverb in their wake. Curiously too you feel like you can actually hear the smile on his face as he sings. This is an album about the love of music, the joy of creation, and it’s infectious.
Fritch’ music is busy, an unrestrained folk orchestra, numerous instruments twitch and hum, bustling away with a precocious musicality, displaying a similar off kilter rhythmic everything but the kitchen sink approach that we’ve seen on his previous releases. But there’ also something magical here, something at times that’s positively angelic. It’s usually when the strings come out, and he enters almost into choral territory vocally. It’s at these moments that you realise that sure the music possess a soaring bubbly precocious effervescence, but Fritch is out there taking risks and trying something new.
It may not immediately be apparent because his music is so wide eyed; he delves into mournful Disney territory, yet it quickly explodes into wistful indie folk fireworks. Fritch has had one foot in the modern classical camp for years, but here it’s much more subtle, acting as an undercurrent beneath his more overt poppier and folksier tunes.
If you’ve kept in touch with his solo work over the last few years, or even that under his Vieo Abiungo moniker then you would understand that this is very much something new for Fritch. Who knew that lurking within his genre defying instrumental excursions was an emotive and meaningful voice that would take his music to another level entirely? Is there anything this guy can’ do?
