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The hardest thing to learn is to live with the weight of our soul. To follow what we are in the depths, until we come face to face with our own private demons. Few of us have the courage to explore those rugged territories. Some manage simply by wielding a guitar. And Chris Whitley is certainly one of these enlightened seekers.
His language is a bloody blues, extracted from the guts of a resonator dobro, digging around those few dusty chords and transporting the listener into a harmonic and melodic limbo. Not conventional and subtractive blues, but rather a highly personal reinterpretation that shuns all conformism and excels in nuances. An adventurous phrasing that, before getting dirty, is an expression of the wounds we carry inside. With Chris, indeed, you are forced to vibrate, just as the strings of his instrument do. As this planet vibrates, in a perpetual state of unrest.
“Dislocation Blues” is the testament of a great and never sufficiently mourned musician. Just a few months later, unfortunately, at only 45 years old, lung cancer would cut short the flight of his art. Not the spirit that drifted immortal in those notes.
“Non ce la fanno / The beautiful die young / And they leave the ugly to their ugly lives”.
The album is a journey of liberation through the cotton fields, in the company of friend Jeff Lang, a more canonical Australian bluesman with a softer voice, but certainly a master of that dark matter. Lang's great merit is in production and mixing, recreating a retro sound with muffled atmospheres, through which the two lay out their emotional watercolors. That sound that Whitley probably always sought and which he had also approached in his last solo effort, the excellent “Reiter In”. The Devil, as they say, is in the details, and no phrase seems more fitting than along these grooves. Songs at the edge of melody, hanging by a thread that seems to be manipulated by inscrutable and morbid forces, and cross us from the most exposed side, the most vulnerable one.
The duo shows a natural chemistry and harmony, both in the reinterpretation of traditionals such as “Hellhound On My Trail” and “Stagger Lee” and in the blues reinterpretations of some Dylan classics like “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “Changing Of The Guards”. But their interplay also works great in their respective solo tracks (“Velocity Girl”, "Twelve Thousand Miles"), in which they often swap both guitar and vocal parts. It must be said that Chris's deep and sensual voice emerges as the true protagonist, insinuating itself between the notes and woody reverberations, rejuvenating like a light rain on our naked bodies.
We are in places where we belong, out of fashion even before out of time, and the blues is the medicine that takes care of our malaise.
After all, we know we will not come out alive from all of this.
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