MATTHEW E. WHITE - Fresh Blood

"On 'Rock & Roll Is Cold,' the second track on Matthew E. White's second album, the 32-year-old Virginian takes a rare break from essaying love in its many various forms to get a little meta, singing about music itself. Off-mic, some cynical cur boasts that he's figured out how to fake it in gospel, soul and R&B. White rolls his eyes, pitying the fool. 'Everybody sees that R&B is free,' he whispers, incredulously. 'Gospel licks,' he adds, 'ain't got no tricks.'

White, by contrast, is no faker, and has got no tricks, evading the valley of slavish copyists by locating his own idiosyncratic dialect within the larger lexicon of soul. The house band at his Spacebomb studio robes his songs with strings, horns, Fender Rhodes, the sort of rich instrumentation that evokes soul at its plushest, but White’s vocals–dry, understated, deadpan–are something else, and the friction between those styles lends Fresh Blood a frisson. His lyrics, meanwhile, are more Bill Callahan than Bill Withers: dark, blackly humorous, mischievous and erotic." - MOJO