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Chris Whitley : Weed
© Messenger Records 2004
Chris Whitley is a master of the National Steel guitar, a difficult instrument that (literally) slides between acoustic and electric blues. It's a description that also fits Whitley the artist, always caught in the distance between styles. Weed is a spacious, dark album, full of understated tension and simmering passions, focused on images of desire, corruption and wanderlust.
There's something both rock-hard and eerily incorporeal about Whitley when he picks and sings without studio prettification. Here even more than on his other bare bones albums Dirt Floor, At Martyr's and Hotel Vast Horizon, his haunted voice evokes Texas ghost towns, where the wind whistles through the rips in the ragged flag and the dark, jagged guitar sounds like something hacked out of an abandoned mine.
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Chris Whitley : War Crime Blues
Blues / Folk Rock
Recorded completely live without overdubs of any kind, Whitley accompanies himself on bottleneck guitar and stomping board. If there were any lingering doubts as to Whitley's abilities as either a brilliant and original songwriter, or as a bona fide American bluesman in the tradition handed down from the American South, this disc should eliminate them for all but the most ignorant.
Chris Whitley : Dirt Floor
Blues / Folk Rock
Dirt Floor is as musically raw and basic as the title implies. With nine of Whitley's unadorned country blues and ballads ... Whitley has tapped into some deep emotional reserves; in his voice and in his guitar playing are ghostly echoes both of black southern blues and ancient Celtic hill music.