Brittany Howard
What Now
★★★★
Island
DURING A nine-minute stretch on the back half of What Now, the compulsive second solo album from Brittany Howard, the former Alabama Shake showcases just how boundless her music can be. She first saunters above a Moroder disco pulse for Prove It To You, swirling alongside blown-out drums and fluorescent call-and-response keys as she pledges her devotion like Donna Summer in the summer of ’77. But she sinks deeply into Samson just a track later, her romantic confusion reflected back at her by the sighing trumpets and dizzying keys of a could-have-been On The Corner outtake. Howard commands in both roles with a power that one is tempted to call bravery, save for the way it suggests she’s doing this for someone else. Instead, What Now captures Howard’s joy – the joy that she finds in singing, in flitting through different forms, and in saying the difficult bits through brilliant song.
A dozen years have passed since the Alabama Shakes shot like a soulful rocket into the stratosphere, their ecstatic revivalism as real and worn-in as a second-hand shirt. It was clear on their second album, Sound & Color, that the burgeoning vision was bigger and that the trio’s regional vintage could not contain Howard long. After she stalled while writing the third record, she pivoted to a kaleidoscopic solo debut, 2019’s Jaime. The jangling jubilance of Stay High was the obvious anchor, but Howard also moved among D’Angelo worship, Pentecostal volume, and New Order slow burns.
Brittany Howard Interviewed: “Prince kissed me on the cheek… Next thing I know, he’d passed away”
What Now is no less discursive, plundering so many styles that it might instead be called What Next. But working with co-producer Shawn Everett in a series of top-tier Nashville hubs, Howard makes it cohere not only through the prayer bowls that clang and drone between tracks but also through the way she captures the wild vacillations of falling in and out of something that’s possibly good and potentially terrible. Where the strutting and mighty title track is a get-lost missive, the hiccupping but hard-hitting Red Flags proclaims that real infatuation means overlooking portents, for better or worse. An unapologetic slab of futuristic funk, Another Day is a self-confident anthem fit for a Pride fête. The gentle-as-a-caress To Be Still begs to be planted like a seed, to bloom slowly in place. If there is a message about messy love that you need to send, Howard can be your telegraph.
What Now is ultimately about the way that relationships control us or that we, in turn, can control them. She works to shake off the past during Power To Undo, a mighty bit of Paisley Park pop, swearing that her sadness won’t lord over her life above guitars that shake and jerk like an anxious hand. But that guard comes down during Every Color In Blue, an unexpected In Rainbows call-back that finds her trying and sometimes failing not to wallow in what’s left behind. It is a beautiful and complicated song for a beautiful and complicated subject – how to make your heart available without having it hurt beyond repair.
What Now is out now on Island. Order a copy: Amazon/Rough Trade
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