When it was released in the US last year, the praise that greeted Matthew E White's debut album was tinged with a degree of shock. To suggest that the 29-year-old appeared out of nowhere is to risk an online comments section chiding your ignorance – "Where have you been if you haven't heard of psychedelic country-rockers the Great White Jenkins and improvisatory jazz octet Fight the Big Bull? Call yourself a rock critic?" Still, it's fair to say his previous work slipped largely under the radar of anyone not paying very close attention to the Richmond, Virginia indie scene: his most high-profile gig to date was as arranger on Transcendental Youth, the last album by the Mountain Goats. In a world of rock and pop where surprises are seldom sprung – where things progress at an internet-forced pace, so new artists start getting written about before they've released anything, and debut albums are greeted with ennui by an audience that have already had their fill before the main course arrives – there's something striking about someone who arrives, without much in the way of fanfare, not merely with a great album, but a grand idea.
Big Inner was the first release from Richmond's Spacebomb, an attempt to create something roughly analogous to Stax or Motown or Philadelphia International, a label-cum-studio with a sound defined by a house band that perform on all their releases, with White and three friends in the MFSB/Funk Brothers role. It's an idea that's long been out of fashion, which is odd considering how venerated many of the records made in that way by those companies are. Perhaps the feeling is that it smacks of the evil monolithic record company stifling the creativity of the true artist, still a bugbear despite compelling evidence to suggest that when your average alt-rock band negotiates a contract with complete artistic freedom, they then exercise that freedom to sound as much like every other alt-rock band as possible.
Either way, should any artists approach Spacebomb in fear that their unique vision will be crushed, White could always reassure them by playing them Big Inner, which sounds about as individual and idiosyncratic as you can get. You can certainly hear echoes of past music in what White does. The string arrangements have a ring of Randy Newman's Sail Away. The gospel inflections and lyrical shifts from spirituality to earthier matters speak as much of a deep love of Southern soul as they do of White's background as the son of Christian missionaries. There's the occasional hint of Harry Nilsson loucheness (on the utterly glorious Hot Toddies, White sounds rather like Nilsson looks on the cover of Nilsson Schmillson – unshaven, dressing-gown clad, hazily recalling the previous night's events with a combination of wistful affection and hungover melancholy) and something of the ramshackle live feel of Dr John's Gris Gris about the unexpected way instruments come in and out of the arrangements. There's a small, lovely moment on the closing Brazos where a tambourine suddenly pops up in the left speaker, being bashed louder than almost everything else, as if someone happened to walk past during the recording, found themselves understandably beguiled by what they heard – the graceful way it moves from lazy, lushly orchestrated country-soul to a five-minute revival-meeting coda featuring a choir singing "Jesus Christ is our lord/ Jesus Christ is our friend" over an oddly Krautrockish bassline – and felt impelled to pick up an instrument and join in.
But for all the 40-year-old reference points, Big Inner never feels like a pastiche; it's audibly more than the sum of its influences, in the same manner as Lambchop's Nixon, and does things none of the artists mentioned above did. Its originality may be down to White's background in jazz, which would account for the occasional squalls of skronking atonal sax, and for his willingness to abandon standard verse-chorus structures for songs that slowly unfurl, changing their mood as they go, and the strange chord progressions and shifts in key that decorate even the most straightforward songs here. Intriguingly, Hot Toddies ends with two fidgety, dark minutes of music almost completely unrelated to the rest of the song. Will You Love Me quotes from Jimmy Cliff's Many Rivers to Cross and sounds not a million miles removed from Joe South's Games People Play, until about two-thirds of the way through. The tune goes somewhere completely unexpected as the lyrics hit their emotional crux. "Darkness can't drive out darkness," sings White, "only love can do that" – and the cumulative effect knocks you sideways.
Big Inner's seven tracks are full of moments like that, moments where you sense that in White, a genuinely great artist might have arrived almost out of the blue. Time will tell whether the Spacebomb project sparks or fizzles: for now, there's the more pressing matter of a fantastic album to listen to.
