Hotel Vast Horizon

1	New Lost World 4:24
2	Breaking Your Fall 3:23
3	Frontier 4:43
4	Hotel Vast Horizon 3:54
5	Blues for André 2:52
6	Assassin Song 3:56
7	Wide Open Return 3:06
8	Silhouette 4:26
9	Insurrection at Newtown 3:33
10	Free Interval 2:40

Barnes & Noble

For most of his career, Chris Whitley has engaged in an endless cycle of beefing up and stripping down, veering back and forth from screaming feedback to intimate whispers. In sharp contrast to his last outing, Rocket House, which featured samples and electronic sounds, the all-acoustic Hotel Vast Horizon accentuates the stillness -- although, as with everything Whitley does, tranquility seldom enters the picture. The disc presents a windswept landscape, one marked by unsteadily painted markers and deeply furrowed roads. The title track exudes a hazy Americana, its shuffling gait propelled by a loping bass line, while "Wide Open Return" draws a neo-Gypsy feel from Whitley's wistful picking and longing, lyrical backward glances. As is his wont, Whitley offers vividly colored but amorphously outlined story lines. "Insurrection at Newtown," for instance, evokes an acrid sense of menace without proffering too many details. While not as unflaggingly dark and dissipated as much of Whitley's past work, Hotel Vast Horizon is still shadowy enough to elicit chills. Like a sepia-toned postcard of long-departed vistas, it seeps into the unconscious, suggesting more in its silences than many collections offer in their loudest moments. David Sprague

All Music Guide

Like Bob Dylan, Chris Whitley's music is deeply informed by the blues. But, also like Dylan, it is defined by a weird rhythmic amorphousness. What at first seems like indistinct strumming is soon brought into shape by angular melodies delivered in Whitley's unmistakable voice -- deep and seemingly sedated. Chord changes are transparent, falling in odd places and practically unrelated to his strumming. None of this is a bad thing. Whitley's music is powerfully original. On 2001's Rocket House, he employed a virtual orchestra of electronic sounds, which provided a fitting frame for his otherworldly mumble-howl. With Hotel Vast Horizon, Whitley returns to more bare settings. The music is created by Whitley (playing guitar and banjo) with bassist Heiko Schramm and drummer Matthias Macht. And though the instrumentation is traditional, he manages to retain a fundamental strangeness throughout, almost defined by the absence of further arrangement. The results are not easy listening, but they are deeply compelling. ~ Jesse Jarnow, All Music Guide