The velocity of an anvil on a coyote’s head – Mike IX Williams (Eyehategod)
The diamond prize: simple, beautiful, clarity – D. Randall Blythe (Lamb of God)
A poetic rhythm that translates like a quality conversation…over a stiff drink at a bar – knotfest.com
Dying Comes With Age vinyl LP release (Rare Bird Books)
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA – How old are you now? Dying Comes With Age is the debut album by writer Ryan Kent expecting an early Summer 2022 release. The LP (via Rare Bird Books) is one uncanny bastard; pulling dark gospel from the genres of spoken word, blues, stoner rock, goth, metal, and folk. If you tossed Ryan Kent into a police line-up with Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Mark Lanegan, and Tom Waits; all anyone would ask is which one of them is the killer? This is the album all you crooks have waited for. COVID brought people together in the wildest of ways. Surprise!
Featuring howling wolves like Randy Blythe (Lamb of God), Jimmy Bower (Eyehategod/Down), Mike IX Williams (Eyehategod), Laura Pleasants (Kylesa), and Eugene S. Robinson (OxBow/Bunuel) only drives the message home: No one anywhere is making anything like this. Peter Dolving (ex-The Haunted) said, “I felt at home. An actual voice. An actual story. An actual vessel.”
The album’s first single “Son Of A Bitch” features instrumentation by Jimmy Bower, back-up vocals by Laura Pleasants, and Kent delivering lead voice. This will be the sleeper hit of the Summer of 2022! Maybe we’ll all “listen to the drain sing.” Happy Birthday, motherfuckers!
Who is Ryan Kent?
Ryan Kent is the author of Poems For Dead People, This Is Why I Am Insane (BIGWRK), Hit Me When I’m Pretty (BIGWRK), and the forthcoming Everything Is On Fire: Selected Poems 2014-2021 (Rare Bird). He is the coauthor of two collections of poetry (w/ Brett Lloyd), Tomorrow Ruined Today, Some Of Us Love You (both by Rare Bird), along with a yet-to-be-titled third coauthored collection with Lloyd (also to be released by Rare Bird). He is currently a staff writer for RVA Magazine and has sang lead vocals in several heavy-metal bands in Richmond, VA since 2008. Ryan maintains a pack-a-day habit.
Dying Comes With Age album info:
All lyrics written by Ryan Kent
Track Listing:
1. Son Of A Bitch (w/ Jimmy Bower and Laura Pleasants)
2. All The Others Were Just Years (Laura Pleasants)
3. I Know What Love Is (w/ Jimmy Bower)
4. Goodbye Fella (D. Randall Blythe)
5. I’ll Take The Usual (w/ Jimmy Bower, Adam Kravitz, Chris Farmer)
6. Message From Someone Going Somewhere With Someone Else Who Is Going Somewhere (w/ Jimmy Bower)
7. Couch Time (w/ Laura Pleasants)
8. The Lurch (Eugene S. Robinson)
9. Dying Comes With Age (w/ Chris Farmer)
10. My Blue Heaven (Dorthia Cottrell)
11. Bring Me My Monster (w/ Jimmy Bower)
12. Cigarettes Roll Away The Time (Mike IX Williams)
Players:
Ryan Kent
Jimmy Bower: Eyehategod/Down
Laura Pleasants: Kylesa/ The Discussion
Chris Farmer: Breadwinner / Dust
D. Randall Blythe: Lamb of God
Eugene S. Robinson: OxBow / Bunuel
Dorthia Cottrell: Windhand
Mike IX Williams: Eyehategod / Corrections House
Adam Kravitz: Gritter / Future Projektor
First Single:
Son Of A Bitch (w/ Jimmy Bower and Laura Pleasants)
Lyrics: Ryan Kent
Music: Jimmy Bower
Video:
The Lurch (Eugene S. Robinson)
Lyrics: Ryan Kent
Directed by R. Anthony Harris for Wharton/Major
Featuring: Ryan Kent, Mary Heffley, Kellie Strawbridge
Praise for Ryan Kent / Dying Comes With Age
"What I find most compelling about Kent’s poetry, is his ability to draw on subject matter from the past so damn clearly without cocooning it within the saccharine filaments of nostalgia. When we write about the past, even the dark past, we tend to soften the edges a bit - or at the very least place it in a gilded golden frame, prettying it up with twenty-five cent words, “clever” turns of phrase, and other such amateurish trickery. On the opposite side of the same coin (for male writers, at least), lies macho overcompensation - the terse, cliché, penis-extending, hard-boiled recollections from the school of hard knocks endlessly churned out by dudes who identify a little too strongly with Hemingway and Bukowski (ahem - guilty as charged, your honor). In between these two poles of too-scared-to-really-write-how-it-is lays the diamond prize: simple, beautiful, clarity. This is where Kent’s well-crafted poems sit - they are evocative, muscular, and masculine without ever descending into the realm of the garish wimp or the boorish blowhard."
– D. Randall Blythe, Lamb of God / author of Dark Days
"Every once in a while, something fresh comes out, something different. Dying Comes With Age is that something. The blend of poetry and music is a venture not often done in this context. At least not to these ears. And I got to play on it to boot!"
– Jimmy Bower, Eyehategod / Down
"Dying Comes With Age will remind you of nothing you’ve ever heard before except maybe the inner voices in your own head, but spoken through clouds of cigarette smoke and with better words, over music playing from inside an empty dive bar in Hell. I listened to the album inside a hotel room in an unfamiliar place and somehow the album made me feel at home, like I was back inside a reoccurring dream, picking up where I left off and happy to be back again. To compare it to anything is impossible – but if there was a David Lynch scene, set in a graveyard, about an old couch played by Charles Bukowski, it would remind me of that. Dying Comes With Age is dark, beautiful, original, and filled with more soul than anything I’ve heard in a long, long time."
– Will Carsola, co-creator of Mr. Pickles, Mama Named Me Sheriff, and Liquid Death Mountain Water.
"Ryan Kent is the cool secret you can feel good about knowing now, before everyone else discovers him. Like the folks who liked Nirvana after Bleach and before Nevermind, or how Bill Murray says in Stripes, 'Tito Puente’s gonna be dead, and you’re gonna say, ‘Oh, I’ve been listening to him for years, and I think he’s fabulous.'”
– Dave Smalley, Down By Law / Dag Nasty / Don’t Sleep / DYS / ALL
"Ryan Kent has not only picked at the inner wiring and subconscious skulking of his brain, he has picked the inner WAR of yours too. With the velocity of an anvil on a coyote’s head – a major breakthrough about slutting around drunk and going through painful breakups that leave us all literally in the snow. Without it all. Without anything. These words pick up months later, where everyone’s sad wedding has ended and their birthday party has been long forgotten. The beautiful, ugliness of words…Preach, motherfucker, preach."
– Mike IX Williams, Eyehategod / Corrections House
"Ryan Kent is a good poet. [His work] perseveres despite the degree of difficulty present when you’re using words to convince those who read those words that the words themselves are worth a good goddamn. Which makes Kent worth a good goddamn in my mind. Specifically, because he writes like he doesn’t care whether you read him or not. A blessing. He doesn’t require the reader to be present in any sort of significant way other than with their eyes and a mind with a proclivity to plumb the uncomfortable, the commonplace, the downbeat, and beyond."
– Eugene S. Robinson, Oxbow / Bunuel