by Patrick Pilch (@pratprilch)
It is December 2019 and I am walking dogs. I see Ryan “Hoagie” Wesley Ensley, the lead vocalist, guitarist and songwriter in Sonny Falls, walking dogs. I say “hey Ryan nice dogs are you walking them?” He says “yea, I am walking these dogs.” We aren’t wearing masks because it’s December 2019, I can see my breath.
In a few months I am driving to Cleveland listening to the “Hoagie Showgie” podcast. Each episode features a different musician. I listen to Hoagie speak with Macie Stewart about endless tour, Greg Obis about the Chicago scene and Joshua Virtue about home life and soil. They all talk music. In one episode, Hoagie talks about recording a guitar solo with Doug Malone from Jamdek Studio. It only takes a take or two because Doug thinks the early take was sufficient. It saves Hoagie a lot of time and thought. Doug Malone is a good producer and Sonny Falls’ new triple tape is their best release yet.
It’s the present, now, and I sit here writing a review for All That Has Come Apart/Once Did Not Exist. We’re going into a “second lockdown,” whatever that means, and not much has changed. Chicago in 2020, like most of America, is a clusterfuck of cognitive dissonance. All That Has Come Apart/Once Did Not Exist is by no means a quarantine record, but rather a brilliant reflection of the present; the present as it was, is, and will continue to be. Released in three separate parts throughout 2020, Sonny Falls’ latest puts our time-specific realities into perspective; what happened then happens now and will happen forever, everything all of the time.
Sonny Falls’ latest record cannot be pinned in absolutes. I can try and try but I know it’ll never sound right. The word “it’s” appears thirty eight times on this album. Ryan Ensley’s imagery spills with simultaneous fascination and frustration, a poet furiously clambering to capture and recapture all the sensations accompanied with existence. There’s this fascination with the pure indescribability of life, death, love, blood, loss, booze, Chicago, first times and funerals. Hell, I’m sure there’s a fascination with the frustration itself. The rich world Ensley shapes is singular and vivid, a universe in itself, a perspective unmatched that beautifully tells and tells and retells again. It’s this “restless, endless entity within everything,” our songwriter so desperately wants us to know about.
From “Rooftop Bar,” Death is:
“...a desert expanse everywhere and no place”
“...a commuter train stuck in a darkening tunnel”
“...the poltergeist bored and shaking the bed”
“...the killer drinking Pepsi and watching TV”
“...testing the space that love has to expand”
This is the part of the review where I’m just gonna straight up tell you how much I fucking love this record. It’s Bruce gone punk, it’s Elliot’s spectre smiling in the corner, it’s an album on the brink of both life and death, existing in that liminal purgatorial space of existing and not. When I listen to this record, I think of all the events that needed to happen for it to even be made. Know what I mean? I hope this album gets to more ears, and I hope this post helps it get there. This is non sequitur, but I just wanted to say the riff in “Pleasure Center Century” is one of the best “walking down the sidewalk” riffs ever. All That Has Come Apart/Once Did Not Exist is so massive, so sprawling, that it’s honestly intimidating to make an absolute statement about it, since I know this record is one I’ll be listening to for years to come with new interpretations, meanings and emotions surfacing each spin.