Chris Whitley

Longtime fans of Whitley’s snake-fueled guitar playing and smoky vocals are going to have to listen to this one a few times before it sinks in. The snakes and smoke remain, but Rocket House utilizes the studio in ways that Whitley has never before attempted in his career. In many ways, this is Whitley’s most contemporary sounding project, a potential problem for fans of the relative timelessness of the National steel-resonator guitar, vocal and stomping-boot approach of some of the artist’s other projects. Careful listeners might recall that Whitley covered Kraftwerks’ “Das Model” on his 1999 release Live at Martyrs’, and that cover seems something of a precursor now. With a band that features DJ Logic spinning vinyl and loop-sampling banjos, Whitley strives successfully to match his own soulful songwriting with the experimentations of the electronic age. Bravo.