Years before he became known to younger generations as a grinning, gray-haired fixture at the Academy Awards, perpetually nominated for life-affirming musical contributions to whatever Pixar blockbuster came out the year before, Randy Newman created tangible three-dimensional worlds in the space of two-minute songs. Matthew E. White was among those who got lost in those worlds, rubbing shoulders with the funny and fucked-up characters that Newman created out of a singular mix of spite and empathy. White became so obsessed with Newman that he eventually tracked down the 60-something singer-songwriter at his Los Angeles home, and handed him his own CDs. It was, in a way, a passing-of-the-torch in reverse.
In White's mind, his debut album, Big Inner, might very well be an attempt to re-create Newman's 1974 concept album about southern otherness, Good Old Boys. Inner is certainly southern, it's definitely other, and the songs collectively tell the kind of story that always appealed to Newman, about painfully human creatures yearning for spiritual transcendence and finding that their own flawed, flesh-and-blood selves always seem to get in the way. But where Newman was among the most literary of the late-60s/early-70s post-Dylan generation of singer-songwriters, White's primary mode of expression on Inner is musical. With his background in jazz arranging and natural grasp of American roots music, the native Virginian has positioned himself at the head of a corps of young and veteran musicians-- including Bon Iver's Reggie Pace, Phil Cook of Megafaun, and David Hood-- determined to revive long-lost record-making traditions in the service of re-imagining psychedelic music as gospel hymns.
Big Inner is the first product of Spacebomb, a production entity and record label with a house band composed of White, bassist Cameron Ralston, and drummer Pinson Chanselle at its core. (There is also a sizeable horn and string section, and a choir.) The idea is to bring artists to White's Richmond, Virginia, headquarters-- essentially the attic of a house on the west side of town-- and arrange their songs in the mold of velvety 70s soul, laidback New Orleans funk, and cosmic country-rock, with a special emphasis on vintage-sounding instrumentation and sweaty intimacy.
White introduces Spacebomb as a fully realized aesthetic right away on Inner's opening track "One of These Days", which has the pulse of Willie Mitchell's productions for Al Green's magical run of early-70s LPs. White and his band play softly but not without purpose; their grip on the central groove remains steadfast even as a procession of ghostly funeral horns enter the picture to send the song in a pleasantly disorienting direction.
He revisits this subtle uneasiness between beauty and chaos throughout Big Inner, as the songs lyrically explore the ecstasy and agony of religion, and how it can explain away the mysteries of the universe, but never permanently. The stately gospel number "Gone Away" is mired in death, with the lord's mysterious ways offering little in the way of consolation. White sings in a pained murmur about how "we cling to the cross with tremblin' and fear," because we know the end will inevitably come. If "Gone Away" pulls you into the darkness, the sinewy bass line in "Big Love" implores you to dance away the knowledge of impending mortality. "Let's begin to spiral," White says, and-- as gospel music is intended to do-- he makes that universal "sinking into the unknown" feeling seem uplifting.
Randy Newman's gift was making his snapshots of racist rednecks and drunken asshole romantics seem like actual people, rather than the creations of a wise-ass Angeleno preoccupied by southern culture on the skids. White's gift on Big Inner is taking sounds created by actual southerners and turning them into figments of his musical imagination, which he bends and shapes into bottomless columns of ethereal soul. The final song on Big Inner, the nearly 10-minute "Brazos", wraps with White and his choir repeating a mantra about how Jesus is our friend and can deliver us from "life's crushing blow." Whether that's truth or fiction is irrelevant; in the magical moments that White creates, it's the wonderment that matters.
