Matthew E. White (US)
Matthew E. White’s debut album Big Inner offers fabulous echoes of Lambchop’s 2000 album Nixon. If you liked Kurt Wagner’s near-whisper of a voice and the way it crooned gently over that Nashville outfit’s subtle evocations of early-70s US country and soul, you’ll love what this Virginia musician and producer together with his Spacebomb House Band achieves on his debut album. Big Inner is soulful in a second Bon Iver album or Gayngs way. Via a sequence of hushed, meditative songs it communicates a calm spirituality as well as a deep love of the dexterously intermingled soul, funk and country you would have heard 40 years ago on an Al Green or Curtis Mayfield record.
White’s complex combination of funk, roots music, soul, Dylan/Newman-esque singer-songwriter constructions is pretty tough to grasp on the first run-through, but it easily communicates this steel passion for music, as a whole; White has just built his own language out of it.
(Source: Stereogum and Guardian)