Matthew E. White's new album, "K Bay," his first solo release in six years, contains many surprises. (Photo by Shawn Brackhill)
"I think this is going to be more polarizing than my other records,” Matthew E. White says about his third solo album, “K Bay.” The 39-year-old Richmond-based singer-songwriter-producer posits that the 11-song disc, completed in 2019, will be a bit “too ambitious” for some. “The people who like it are really going to like it, and then there are going to be people who can't handle it.”
White's shape-shifting urban soundscape comes six years after his last album, “Fresh Blood,” which showed hints of the sweeping pop-funk approach of “K Bay” — mainly in rollicking tracks like “Rock 'n' Roll Is Cold.” And as early as 2012, The New York Times was praising White’s music for “hitting the extremes of the mood spectrum.”
But the moods on “K Bay” are a little more extreme. "Fresh Blood," White’s sophomore release, like his lauded 2011 debut, “Big Inner,” starts off with a contemplative piano-led ballad featuring the artist's trademark mumbly baritone and up-close intimacy. In contrast, the new “K Bay” goes glam and gets funky from the very beginning, with retro-futuristic new wave, Prince-like dance anthems and driving rock. This is clearly not your old college girlfriend's Matthew E. White.
The set kicks off with a pun-laden, sonically engaging groove (“Genuine Hesitation”) that sustains itself for seven minutes before surrendering to a spacey Moog-like solo and a symphonic outro that resembles a horror film score. Before you know it, you're knee-deep into “Electric,” the record's danciest and most infectious track, before the brooding rocker “Nested” barges in next and builds into a mesmerizing groove. That's as good a side one as you will find in 2021.
Thanks to the deft playing of an all-star cast of Richmond musicians, including keyboardist Devonne Harris, Bio Ritmo percussionist Giustino Riccio and White's idol, drummer Brian Jones, White keeps up his flow of melodic hooks, genre-hopping song construction and — as the liner notes call his studio fairy dust — “retro futurist magic tricks.” If anything is going to confuse people, it's that the hushed, somber-toned singer actually sounds like he's having fun.
One highlight of “K Bay” is the ebullient, happy-go-lucky “Judy,” a nickname for White’s wife, Merry, who appears many times in his song lyrics. He acknowledges her influence but stops short of using the m-word. Songwriting is trickier than that, he says.
“Muse is a funny word. I'm not sure I'd use that word. I'm not trying to run from that, but when I'm writing songs, I'm into how the words flow, does it rhyme, how do the consonants work together, is this sentence working? I'm not writing about my wife or anyone else. That line might be exactly like Merry, and the next might be something that happened to me when I was 17, and the next something that happened with my cat.”
White's stripped-down soul searching comes late in the disc, with the reflective “Only in America/When the Curtains of the Night Are Peeled Back.” A piano ballad that ends in ethereal synths and anguished wailing, it's clearly meant to be a statement. “The song is about white privilege and systemic racism,” he says, “and it's about mourning the loss of a lot of African Americans who have been taken before their time.”
If you were judging by solo output, you'd think that the tall, bearded troubadour had been lying low since 2015. But White's never been busier as a collaborator and entrepreneur, co-producing and co-writing two albums for fellow Virginia Beach native Natalie Prass; helping to plot out new digs and artists for Spacebomb, the label, management company and studio he founded in 2012; and joining with singer Flo Morrissey and artist/poet Lonnie Holley for two side projects.
White has been in the studio again recently, recording an instrumental album. He's also planning a tour that will include a hometown stop, perhaps in December, and considering reaction to the new disc. “There’s not much other stuff that's on the same scale,” he says.