ARTIST: Chris Whitley
TITLE: Soft Dangerous Shores
LABEL: Rubber Records
GENRE: Blues
TIME: 41:06 min
SIZE: 57,3 MB
RIP DATE: Jul-29-2005
RELEASE DATE: Jul-25-2005
WEBSITE: n/a
Track List:
01. Fireroad (For Two) 03:27
02. Soft Dangerous Shores 04:11
03. As Day Is Long 03:30
04. Valley Of The Innocents 03:28
05. City Of Women 06:36
06. Times Square Machine (N.Y.C February 1991) 00:54
07. Her Furious Angels 03:11
08. Last Million Miles 04:21
09. Medicine Wheel 04:22
10. End Game Holiday 03:53
11. Breath Of Shadows 03:13
Release Notes:
Let us now relinquish collegiate classification and
pithy pigeonholing. That ain't no way to open a
dialogue on an album as broad-minded and
swelteringly cinematic as Chris Whitley's Soft
Dangerous Shores. The 11th album of Whitley's
career, Soft Dangerous Shores has a way of blurring
customary rationale and commonsensical definition.
As a songwriter and performer who has nurtured his
individuality through the transfiguration of
folk-blues archetypes, Whitley's been the frequent
victim of oversimplified categorization (enabled, in
part, by the traditional feel of records like Dirt
Floor and War Crime Blues). Such reductionist charms
-- however lazy or accurate -- simply won't work on
Soft Dangerous Shores, which may be both the most
experimental and accessible release in Whitley's
discography: its genre mash-ups are fearless
exaltations of integration, and its humid,
plainspoken delivery (both tempting and tempestuous)
pushes familiar buttons.
It's not a blues record, not a soul record, not an
electronic record, but a record of sensations and
movements and tastes. Its evocative sound --
assuming elements of the aforementioned genres but
showing no biased allegiance to any of them -- is
dense with the heat of human contact, a spiritual
obsession with the flesh, winded with desire and
reeling with sex. With Soft Dangerous Shores,
Whitley is operating in some singular, indefinable
realm of inspiration and creativity, eschewing
stereotypes and rule book logic for primal
sensation. An album that expands its lungs with such
rich, multi-geographical air could only be the
product of someone as restless and uprooted as
Whitley: its burrowing National Steel guitar
reflects his Texas upbringing, while the critical
percussion, synths, and samples are glimpses of a
broader -- via NYC, Belgium, and Dresden --
sensibility.
Whitley's German rhythm section from 2003's Hotel
Vast Horizon (bassist Heiko Schramm and drummer
Matthias Macht) returns to the fold, along with
producer Malcolm Burn (who helmed Whitley's 1991
debut Living With the Law). They all play prominent
roles in the formation of Soft Dangerous Shores'
swirling cauldron of sound, a churning whirlpool of
textural gales that is alternately entrancing,
conjuring, and deceptively monotonous. Each song
implements a groove at the outset that is followed
through to its end; initial presentations are
slightly amended and augmented in the course of each
performance, but the mutations are carefully
storyboarded and patiently executed. Opener
"Fireroad (For Two)" sets the record's style and
approach accordingly: a cataclysmic strum on the
guitar unleashing the tortured and naked groove;
Whitley's thrillingly hoarse voice occasionally
trespassing into falsetto; and the rhythm section,
fidgety and authoritative, anchors it all down while
synths and samples breech the groove.
Burn's production holds everything together like a
beautifully dilapidated building, constructing a
sound whose character is chipped and flaked, but
resilient -- an antique model that reflects the
quizzical modernity surrounding it. Macht's incensed
drums expand and echo in the urgent title track,
battling the translucent synthesizers for bragging
rights. "Last Million Miles" gurgles like Stevie
Wonder in an abandoned warehouse; all the
wah-wah-inspired ricocheting and bleeding make it
difficult to discern which instrument is behind
which sound. It's all just slathered together, mucky
and heady and funky and pulsing with life. The mix
is allowed its most inspired brainstorming session
in the six-and-a-half-minute "City of Women", an
impressionist blend of sounds that seems to hover in
place beneath Whitley's voice, the icy synth tones
cutting through the speculative haze.
If Dirt Floor and War Crime Blues argued Whitley's
underrated status as a fierce guitarist, then Soft
Dangerous Shores is all about his voice. Like honey
laced with gravel, Whitley's voice digs into the
record's aural architecture, creaking under its
floorboards, a wonder both inviting and
intimidating. He channels the bedside seduction of a
parched and exhausted Al Green on "City of Women"
and "Her Furious Angels", the latter a song from War
Crime Blues given the full-band treatment and
transformed into a sultry slice of primordial R&B.
He gives himself over to the near-metallic grind of
"Medicine Wheel" and the dead-man float of "End Game
Holiday" like trees yield and bend to the rhythm of
the wind. All the while, Whitley keeps the mood
mysterious, alluding to some kind of menacing
arousal or arousing menace, speaking of tangibles
and whispering in code.
Reflecting the highly insinuative music, Whitley's
lyrics are all about feeling, imagery, and
cognizance; like Richard Buckner, he crafts
scrupulous poetry that's emotionally instinctive and
surmountable. His ideas, no matter how elusively
delivered, are rooted in universal sensations:
there's mortality (and old blues residue) in lines
like "How long I be chased / 'Fore the earth take me
in / From the valley I taste / Whole futures on her
skin"; uninhibited promises of lust ("Steal me now /
Into breathing rooms / Under steaming oaths / Till
my lips could trace the shade between your thigh");
and the frequent intertwining of life, love, and
death ("Looking out from your bed / Like I just got
born"). They're mutable words and, like Soft
Dangerous Shores' music (haunted funk, wounded soul,
reconstituted blues), part of a larger, moldable
canvas. Whitley calls it a "Euro-trash/folk-blues
thing". But a record as good as this doesn't need to
be defined -- only adopted, weathered, and, with any
luck, embraced.