Matthew E. White - Fresh Blood

Still vinyl amateurs, we played the record at the wrong speed (45 rpm instead of 33) for our first few listens. Luckily, it was a record that sounded great at any speed, a brisk, near-perfect collection of seven songs that drifted into each other like one continuous, fully realized groove, adorned with horn and string arrangements that seemed to pop out of the speakers. In other words, it was exactly what I had hoped records could be when we first got the turntable.

The LP also contained two letters, one from Hometapes’ Sara Heathcott, the other from White himself. They welcomed the listener to Big Inner and thanked them for being there. They also served as something of a primer and mission statement for Spacebomb Records, detailing White’s influences and his quest to build a house band, recording studio, and label that could be his own Motown, his own Stax. They promised a forthcoming record from a relative unknown named Natalie Prass. It all felt earnest, if a tad grandiose.

Three years later, that hint of grandiosity feels like an understatement. Big Inner was met with universal acclaim, Natalie Prass’ self-titled debut seems destined to find itself in any conversation about the Best of 2015 by year’s end, and the man behind it all is bringing us an immaculate injection of Fresh Blood.

If Big Inner documented White’s (ultimately very successful: see above) search for family, identity, and self-made success, Fresh Blood finds him reveling in it. It begins quietly enough, with White’s smoky baritone rolling over the opening piano of “Take Care My Baby” like a cloud drifting over a mountain. Over the course of the next five minutes, the song builds to an exacting, ecstatic mix of soulful guitar, horn accents, and swelling strings. It’s a swirl of sounds that will feel immediately familiar to any fan of Big Inner, and that’s part of the point: it invites the listener to pick up right where that album left off.

The rollicking first single “Rock & Roll Is Cold” follows, celebrating the towering influence of gospel and R&B in White’s work with 12-bar piano, a rhythm section bolstered by subtle tambourines and shakers, brilliant backing vocals, and playful lyrics explicitly extolling the virtues of those styles while poking fun at the demise of rock music. But White is at his best lyrically when he’s less precise, pairing flowery, somewhat vague language with the lush arrangements that accompany it. This is evidenced on the lusty, swaggering “Fruit Trees”. Over an emphatically pounding beat and blustery horns—either of which could easily be reimagined in the context of hip-hop—White says a lot without saying much at all. He recalls fragments of memory—the “fragrance of an orange blossom”, “two Coca-Colas in the shade, crushed ice”. They’re snippets, not a story, but by the time he belts “light me on fire and let me burn”, it’s clear what he means.

What follows is a highlight in an album of standouts. “Holy Moly” is a headfirst dive into minor-key devastation. Building from a spare opening to a dizzying coda, it recalls dirges as disparate as Brand New’s “Limousine” and Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”. White’s best work feels like something you’ve known your entire life, as though he’s plucked some Platonic ideal of a song out of the ether that all are aware of but few can touch (check “Circle ‘Round The Sun”, pieces of which recall The Band’s “The Weight” as an additional reference). It’s not just a trick of association, however; these feel like classics in their own right.

“Holy Moly” is also, along with “Tranquility”, something of a centerpiece. Both have been discussed extensively in the weeks leading up to the album’s release due to their themes—sexual abuse in the church in the case of “Holy Moly”, the death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the case of “Tranquility”. White utilizes a mix of brutality and compassion in each that allows him to deftly navigate topics that would leave most other writers out of their depth. On “Holy Moly”, he attacks the men who perpetrate abuse just as heartily as he empathizes with the children who find themselves victims. “Tranquility” doesn’t pull any punches about the “point underneath the skin” or the “sixty-five bags of heroin”, but White’s compassion bleeds through so clearly that these gory details feel like a necessary part of the coping process, as though proving that we can only begin to deal with death when we confront its brutal reality. After that emotional knockout punch, the remaining three tracks—“Golden Robes”, “Vision”, and “Love Is Deep”—blur in to a welcome, sleepy relief.

Over the course of these ten songs, we don’t really learn anything new about Matthew E. White. The greatest stories on Fresh Blood—the death of rock & roll, sexual abuse in the church, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s untimely overdose—are ones we know already. This is, to some extent, by design. In an interview with The Quietus last month, White said ““For me, my career is about making records and it's about making records that are better than the ones before; it's not about making records that are different.” If that’s the case, those myth-making letters may be the most I’ll ever know about White.

One thing that is clear: he can keep doing this. He can keep throwing his gliding baritone over lush, complex arrangements, effortlessly navigating between different narrators to deliver in wonderful and exciting (if not necessarily new) ways. That’s enough for me. “Feelin’ good is good enough” after all.