Two years ago, Alabama Shakes performed at the White House as the Obamas sat in the front row, just a few feet away. The Athens, Ala. band were part of a "Memphis Soul" revue celebrating that city’s groundbreaking '60s sounds, which famously featured black and white musicians working together to make lasting hits like "Hold On, I'm Comin'" in the thick of the civil rights era. The visual symbolism of the event was powerful, a historically rich triumph of the unity that soul music has often portended: As the nation’s first black president looked on, multiracial Shakes frontwoman Brittany Howard led her band of white instrumentalists—along with Memphis greats Booker T. Jones and Steve Cropper—on the classic 1967 blues track "Born Under a Bad Sign". Barack and Michelle nodded their heads in respectful rhythm. Malia seemed mildly amused. Sasha, meanwhile, was bored. Like, remarkably bored. Her flat stare was the type usually reserved for dentist waiting rooms or Target customer service lineups. Her obligatory golf clap at the end of the song was wan to the point of noiselessness.
Howard, for her part, could probably see where the youngest Obama was coming from. During the performance, the singer paced impatiently, seemingly humbled by the pageantry and also perhaps feeling a little constricted by the antiquity of it all. It wasn’t that Howard and her band didn’t know their blues; the working-class quartet came from a small town in the mythic South and cut their teeth on hours-long sets of covers. And when the frontwoman belted, "Hard luck and trouble been my only friend/ I been on my own ever since I was 10," the lines held pointed meaning for Howard since she lost her older sister—and only sibling—to cancer when she was around that age. But for all their preternatural grit, sweat, and passion (along with every other age-old signifier of rock'n'roll authenticity known to man), Alabama Shakes were never quite comfortable with the retro-soul box many placed them into upon their arrival in 2012. To be fair, their debut, Boys & Girls, certainly deserved the tag, its vintage moves elevated mostly by Howard’s gale-force delivery, an instrument that could have blown Otis Redding back. The band’s effortless charm, instant familiarity, and Great Recession recovery anthem "Hold On" made them easy to root for, and the album went onto sell more than 700,000 copies. It felt as if they could be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at any moment.
And yet, the idea taking on the mantle of '60s soul was never part of the plan for Alabama Shakes. In interviews, they casually distanced themselves from the pure revivalists of Daptone Records while repping for theatrical sensationalists like Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, and My Chemical Romance; their origin story had Howard noticing bassist Zac Cockrell because he was wearing an At the Drive-In shirt; when the band hit "Saturday Night Live" recently, Howard wore earrings emblazoned with Prince’s face. "We just don’t wanna own the classic R&B title and let people down," guitarist Heath Fogg diplomatically stated around the release of Boys & Girls, "because when we go electronic on the next record it might break some hearts."
Sound & Color is not an electronic record. But it is strange and mystical and unexpected—more Houses of the Holy than "Holy Cow". It’s got past lives and future people, traces of Curtis Mayfield, Erykah Badu, MC5, the Strokes. There’s a song called "Shoegaze" that could find a second home on the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You. Bon Iver collaborator Rob Moose provides eerie string arrangements that slowly encroach on songs like ivy climbing up a fence while the band and co-producer Blake Mills tweak tones and rhythms to make guitars and drums and bass and keyboards sound genuinely exciting—fresh, even—in 2015. This is stadium soul with one eye peeking toward another galaxy while hands and feet and throats desperately try to suss out life here on Earth.
Of course, Howard is at the center of it all. Over the course of the last three years, she’s managed to take complete control over her unbridled voice without losing a smidge of spontaneity. She’s no longer just building toward an ecstatic climax (though there are several of those here), but rather exploring the upper reaches of her register, cajoling instead of hollering, taking on operatic cadences. The singer, who took part in both raucous Baptist services as well as a cappella hymns in the Church of Christ growing up, layers her vocals on almost every track, offering harmonies and ghosts that can’t help but follow her around; on one bipolar love song, what sounds like ghoulish laughter echoes behind Howard as she pours her being into the words "gimme all your love!" Is she reveling in her desires? Sending up her larger-than-life voice? Smiling into the void of unrequited love? Yes, yes, and yes.
As a lyricist, Howard excels at spinning down-home profundity that make her sound her age, 26, and years beyond. Along with her tales of haunted love, cautious optimism, and impassioned pacifism come more impressionistic songs that mean to find connections between epochs and space. She and her band travel through the blues back to a bad sign—or is it a good one?—on "Gemini", a six-and-a-half-minute excursion into zero-gravity funk. Whereas Alabama Shakes once seemed destined to relive the history of others, they invent their own genesis here, as weeds grow near the Tennessee River and eyes reveal dreams that eventually must wake up. And just as the song comes to a close, it keeps going for a little while longer.
