Old Style by Ryan Ricks, Chris Cappello

The Split Everyone's Been Asking For

Here are two blurbs from the reviews:

"Once a particularly 'terrible' enfant of the New England emotional underground Rockmuzik scene, Cappello followed his ancestral forebears upon completing his University Education by undertaking an eremitical and indeed quizzically Romantic quest, leaving behind the grand metropolis of New Haven once and for all, and striking out upon paths yet untrodden in search of pastures new -- eventually, indeed, to the ends of that great firmament they call America, and even, some have said, to our very shores. He has returned to the scrutiny of the public eye a little worse for wear, yet not entirely divorced of those charms with which he once delighted the drawing rooms of the Constitution State's grand doyennes. The two songs by which he is here represented in this curious split release dwell upon those grand eternal themes of Love and Death, and while shades of his youthful maladie d'esprit remain present, there is an unexpected lightness that glimmers forth too, even something of a comic sensibility. Such contradictions indeed reflect the Essence of our artist in his new guise, who knows, as my grandsire once held, that "spiritual Music can spring only from Discords set in Harmony," and that "but for Evil there were no Good, as Victory is only possible by Battle."

- Hermann D. Teufelsdröckh, Hamburger Register

“For Ricks, Old Style marks both a continuation and evolution of the screwball alt-rock sound he spent the past seven years developing with his now-defunct band, Phoned In, as well as in his earlier solo work from the mid-2010s. “Kilo in the Crawl Space” is a winking ditty about a romance deflated by the pressures of class and the frivolity of youth, a sort of a defamiliarized “Uptown Girl” for people who know who Gayatri Spivak is or whatever. “There Was A Bar” finds Ricks going Cali-mode, interweaving his trademark sense of play into a smoke shop tapestry centered on the story of two star-crossed lovers who inevitably discover their signs are, in fact, incompatible. There’s talk of Egyptian sheets, fate, capital-d Darkness, and freshly-paved streets. It’s big stuff for a perpetual funny man like Ricks, but the cards are only half revealed. Both songs feel like receiving a handshake from a man who’s hidden a buzzer in his palm. Vintage Ricks.”

- Lennay Kekua, Hawaiian Times

The Tank & his songs.