Matthew E. White & Lonnie Holley – Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection
Spacebomb/Jagjaguwar – Out Now
The collaboration between seventy-year-old sculptor and vocalist Lonnie Holley and songwriter/producer/Spacebomb Records impresario Matthew E. White crackles with a rare kind of electricity that goes beyond its novelty. As a meeting of creative minds, it perhaps bears comparison with Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart’s infamous hook-ups, though those two came from roughly the same generation and similar scenes. White and Holley’s previous solo records are ostensibly chalk and cheese. Holley’s recent career has seen him tread the path of the rough-hewn street poet, his songwriting a cauldron of righteous anger aimed at racial and social injustice, boiling with discordant, heavy blues. White, by contrast, has taken a more melodic route: his 2015 album Fresh Blood saw him emerge as an avowed disciple of Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, while he has also dipped his toe into the waters of country music. On paper at least he is a kind of soulful, rootsy guru, with a strictly 1970s aesthetic that is backed up by a very modern and very effective business model.
But there is clearly more to White than that. While recording Fresh Blood he pieced together a seven-strong backing band (including a four-piece rhythm section) and recorded a series of long, loose jams, directly inspired by Miles Davis’ iconic Bitches Brew. They weren’t quite what White wanted at the time – too weird, presumably – but they have finally found a home here on Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection, where they find a perfect partner in Holley’s gritty, gutsy tirades, most of which are spoken, screamed or howled.
While the Bitches Brew comparisons are valid, Holley’s vocals add something a little extra: the result almost has the feel of Miles Davis’ wife Betty’s early albums. But while Betty Davis sang about lust, passion and female strength, Holley is concerned primarily with the ills of modernity with our relationship with technology and how it has changed our lives for better and (primarily) for worse. The title track examines the fragmentary nature of the contemporary world, and how mobile phones and the constant sharing of images on social media contribute to that fragmentation. The lyrics are unpolished (they seem to be taken straight from Holley’s diaries) but that is part of their appeal, and while the message is a familiar one it is nonetheless valid, and furthermore it undergoes a kind of defamiliarising process thanks to the sheer strange power of the delivery and the abstract nature of the music that underpins it. As well as going deep into the wilds of funk, the duo venture to the furthest borders of blues, and the result is not unlike those early long-form Captain Beefheart experiments like Tarotplane or Mirror Man.
The abstractions come in the form of Zappa-esque cut-ups applied to some seriously hard, lysergic funk – the filthy, fluid bass of opening track This Here Jungle of Moderness brings to mind Sly Stone or Funkadelic, while the title track is both locked-in and hyper-changeable. Organs jab and stab over a drum beat that wouldn’t be out of place at the heavier end of krautrock.
I Cried Space Dust is, at just under four minutes, the briefest of the album’s five pieces by far, but its accumulation of overdubbed vocals and clattering percussion offers its own kind of transcendence. I’m Not Tripping, by contrast, sounds like Dr John broke into the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, recorded some vocals, and slipped some brown acid into the communal tea urn. Closer Get Up! Come Walk With Me burns slower but no less brightly, advancing on a kind of minimalist-surrealist version of a blues riff, and giving Holley’s exceptional voice room to do its thing.
Broken Mirror shares kinship with such an array of great albums of the past that its greatest feat might be how it manages to sound quite so modern. This is a testament not only to Holley’s fiercely relevant songs but to White’s impressive showing as a composer: each song has its own identity, just as each fits in with the album’s identity as a whole. The result is deep, complex and formidable, but also intensely rewarding.
https://spacebombrecords.bandcamp.com/album/broken-mirror-a-selfie-reflection