Living With The Law – Chris Whitley

When Chris Whitley released Living With The Law in 1991, it didn’t seem like a debut album. There was something weathered, something weary and something resigned about this frontier troubadour that simply didn’t fit with the idea of a fresh faced debutante.

It turns out that Whitley was not an overnight sensation at all – while this album was his first in the mainstream he had been plying his trade for almost a decade around Europe being loosely based in Belgium.

But there was no doubting this was an American album. The Texan Whitley recorded the album in New Orleans with producer Malcolm Burn himself a craftsman schooled in the Daniel Lanois style of atmospherics. The sound is based around the sound of the National Steel guitar and Whitley’s vocals which manage the dual achievements of sounding desert dry and gorgeously seductive at the same time. He manages an almost funkster-like falsetto groove on some songs while maintaining the heart of a bluesman.

This album managed to pre-date the whole alt-country movement and was a pioneering work in both style and spirit. It’s not surprising that Whitley found an audience in both the camps of traditional blues followers and the fanbase of alternative art rock bands like Sonic Youth.

Whitley’s songs are populated with characters seeking redemption but also seeking a place to lay their head. They are not outlaws and renegades as such but you get the sense that if they were pushed far enough something might just crack with ugly consequences. In fact when one of his protagonists does in fact end up in Leavensworth it’s telling that he states “I do not count no days”.

In the world of Living With The Law it seems sex and praying are treated as equally essential and equally futile pursuits but both are undertaken because they are available where much else is not.

This is an album that is clearing greater as a whole than as a sum of its parts but having said that there are some songs on here that are unforgettable in isolation. Amongst these are Big Sky Country which feels like it sounds and sounds like it should. Others like the title track, Dust Radio and Kick The Stones have memorable hooks that make them stand out but perhaps the best track it the slowly creeping and angular Long Way Around that is hidden down the back of the album but is an example of the riches found when you scratch the surface of this work.

Chris Whitely went on to make another ten or so albums and explore quite a few more sonic landscapes before his death from lung cancer in 2005, but none quite had the impact of Living With The Law. He should be remembered as a significant artist and this as a great album.