“I’ve been staying open, you don’t wanna develop,” Brittany Howard sings on the title observe from her second solo document. The track is a hard-funk failing-relationship jeremiad which may go away the “you” in query decreased to a puddle on the ground by the point it’s performed. However whoever she’s singing to ought to’ve recognized higher. Staying relentlessly open has been Howard’s tenet going all the best way again to her breakout second fronting Athens, Alabama garage-rockers Alabama Shakes within the early 2010s.
She’s a grasp of creating forward-moving music that also passionately honors custom. The Shakes rapidly went from the ecstatic down-home rock & roll of their 2012 debut, Boys & Ladies, to the uncooked psychedelia of 2015’s Sound & Shade. That yr, Howard additionally reduce a enjoyable document with the Nashville band Thunderbitch that sounded just like the New York Dolls crushing a Floribama keg get together. When the Shakes went on hiatus, she delivered her solo debut, Jaime, deepening her music’s rock-soul roots in addition to its non secular, private, and political underpinnings in ways in which felt ravenously model new. In 2021, she gave us Jaime (Reimagined), with contributions from Infantile Gambino, Earthgang, and Bon Iver, amongst different like-minded sonic question-askers.
What Now is one other aspect of Brittany Howard that makes every of her earlier departures really feel like a child step by comparability. “Earth Signal” opens with a spacious avant-jazz pastorale that will get larger, stronger, and grittier because it builds to a sunburst climax. “I Don’t” is a craving Philly soul reverie. “Show It To You” suggests Prince getting busy within the studio after coming dwelling from a U.Okay. tour within the late Eighties with an armload of acid home information. “Samson” is a strikingly low-key ballad that evolves into molten fusion drift lifted by Rod McGaha’s trumpet, bringing to thoughts the softer, extra fluid meditations of mid-Seventies Miles Davis. By the point you attain the album-ending “Each Shade in Blue,” with liquid In Rainbows-period Radiohead guitar backing Howard’s powerhouse Nina Simone-esque vocals, what ought to be a willful marriage of opposites feels stunningly pure.
Howard, who recorded the album in Nashville with producer Shawn Everett, is on level in each setting, a cautious, empathetic, authoritative soul singer who’s additionally a scorching, explorative guitar participant. The album’s continuously shifting tone is the proper backdrop for lyrics that map out the embattled middle-spaces of affection, at all times with an eye fixed in direction of the emotional ironies that undergird, embolden, and/or problematize want. “How lengthy I’m I supposed to attend earlier than I inform you I like you,” she proffers towards the bass pops and boom-bap of “Persistence.” Everywhere in the album, Howard makes one thing new out of honeyed romantic idioms, the identical approach she performs within the free areas between classic musical settings. “You’ve the ability to undo every little thing that I need,” she sings on “Energy To Undo,” one of many album’s most combustable Prince reclamations. It seems like a sentiment we’ve heard earlier than, till you’re taking a step and course of the individualized heartache at its middle.
“Pink Flags” leaps and twists and doubles in on itself, without delay elated and contorted, identical to the emotions Howard unpacks when she sings, “One of the best instances that I ever had, that’s when the worst instances began.” That’s tough. And that’s precisely what makes What Now such a wierd rush: This can be a document that reminds what number of worlds exist between pleasure and ache.
