Album Review: Matthew E White - Big Inner

If anyone claims to have seen this coming, they're lying. Session musician Matthew E White has, in Big Inner (or “beginner”, geddit?), crafted the kind of soulful, down-home album filled with liberal doses of Southern gospel that doesn't get made anymore. Furthermore, it's the kind of album that belies its creation – this will stand the test of time.

White's lyrics are no more than a mournful shuffle, yet the rich timbre of his voice sweeps you off your feet. Furthermore, the orchestral moments, the whispered choirs, the horns buried low in the mix, all add to the notion of a community of jazz players sermonising in an abandoned church in the Baton Rouge. The whisper of the Good Word is never far away; the choir and White repeating “He will tear your kingdom down” on Gone Away – with Motown guitar lines and trumpets weaving in and out – evokes the most soulful of masses, while the Jesus Christ mantra halfway through Brazos takes on a reverent fervour. There are funky, honky-tonk homages (Steady Pace) and world-altering, life-affirming epiphanies (Will You Love Me); odes to drink (Hot Toddies) and the ruminations of a life taken far too early (Gone Away).

And White stands out front and centre, a long-haired white man channelling the likes of Otis Redding and Jimmy Cliff with an evangelical air that's neither imitative, sacrilegious nor overbearing (like Randy Newman before he became a Pixar-pandering populist). With like-minded soul Justin Vernon paving the way, Big Inner is proof that White not only has the nous to attempt such an ambitious project, but the nuance and warmth to turn it into an album of the ages.