Chris Whitley has always played as if his life depended on it. Last year’s
masterful manifesto War Crime Blues was so raw you could practically taste the
blood on the strings of his National Steel guitar. Soft Dangerous Shores is just
as emotionally urgent, but it’s a far headier brew, an atmospheric dreamscape
set to the throbbing pulse of a drum machine. Though the album was recorded in
Kingston, New York, it has the smoky ambience of an afterhours club in Paris
or Whitley’s adopted hometown of Dresden, Germany.

The sonic palette—a hypnotic wrestling match between juke joint blues and
Kraftwerkian beats—is the handiwork of Malcolm Burns, who also produced
Whitley’s classic 1991 debut Living with the Law. But the intertwined layers
of desire and despair are pure Whitley at his most erotic. In parched, strangulated
vocals that struggle to rise above the surface, he invokes a “City of Women” where “these
desires could kill me dead” and “everywhere I go is wet and red.” Yowser!
Death stalks desire at every turn, but against all odds, love manages to elude
it. “Fireroad” offers hope of escape from the devastating firebombing
of Dresden, while “Breath of Shadows” envisions “the dead and
living coming true” at the font of a “burning mouth.”

Visceral enough to haunt your dreams, and cerebral enough to give them meaning,
Whitley’s latest dispatch from the far side of the ocean lands exactly
where he intended it to—on Soft Dangerous Shores.