Chris Whitley & Jeff Lang – Dislocation Blues
Recorded seven months before Chris Whitley’s death in November 2005, Dislocation Blues matches a mentor with a protege. Whitley and young Australian blues revisionist Jeff Lang team up for a back-to-basics, howl-and-grind, dusk-till-dawn inquiry into what the master knows about the blues (a lot) and what the student is willing to learn (anything).
The material ranges from a precise, uniquely detailed narrative of “Stagger Lee” to covers of the underutilized but fully realized Dylan tunes “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “Changing Of The Guard”, plus Prince’s “Forever In My Life”. All are intense enough to purge familiar structures, but never so discordant as to displace direct emotions.
The album’s feel, especially on the stripped-back co-write “Motion Bride” and a superior reconsideration of the old Whitley original “Rocket House”, recalls Whitley’s great 1998 solo acoustic album Dirt Floor. The sound, with a hard-smacking but song-serving rhythm section of Grant Cummerford and Ashley Davies, can be as volatile as on Whitley’s 1995 disc Din Of Ecstasy, but without the overdriven fireworks. The title track — with Lang improvising on a Turkish fretless banjo called the chumbush as Whitley seethes through the refrain “Where can a heretic call home?” — comes on like a time-lapse chain of lightning.
Posthumous albums generally are hazy, elusive subjects; this one isn’t. It’s a striking document of two outsiders looking and listening in on their own souls.