Gary Clark Jr. could have taken the easy road. He had the chops, the tone and the pedigree to spend the rest of his career being hailed as the next great Texas blues guitar hero. Instead, since signing to a major label, he has gradually dismantled that image. On This Land, the transformation is complete. The guitar is still there, and when Clark lets it loose there are moments that remind you exactly what he can do with six strings, but he has become something much more interesting: a modern soul artist using blues, funk, rock, hip-hop and electronic music to tell stories about the world around him.
That world isn't particularly pretty. This Land is a chronicle of supposedly post-racial America as experienced by a Black man from Texas, and anger runs through much of the record. Yet reducing it to a political album misses a large part of what Clark is doing. There are songs about racism and alienation alongside songs of love, lust, family and loss. The politics come from lived experience rather than slogans, which gives the record considerably more weight.
The title track makes that clear immediately. Taking its title and part of its premise from Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land", Clark turns an American folk ideal inside out. The guitars are slow, raw and dirty, the mood is threatening and his delivery sounds genuinely furious. A funky backbeat, electronic textures and an almost rap-like vocal flow place it firmly in the present. If this is blues, it's blues filtered through Funkadelic and contemporary Black music, closer in spirit to Childish Gambino than Stevie Ray Vaughan.
That distinction matters throughout This Land. Clark isn't interested in recreating a mythical blues past. His musical reference points stretch from Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye through Funkadelic and Prince to hip-hop, electronic music and modern rock. Even when a familiar form appears, he tends to bend it into something else.
"I Got My Eyes on You (Locked & Loaded)" could almost be Curtis Mayfield transported into the twenty-first century, Clark's expressive vocal carrying a chorus designed to lodge itself in your head. The guitar waits patiently before entering to increase the tension, building over the repeated chorus until the song finally breaks down. "Feed the Babies" works from a similar soul and funk vocabulary, beginning relatively sparsely and growing as instruments accumulate. When the horns arrive, the track suddenly opens up, and Clark's guitar at the end makes it one of the album's strongest moments.
Prince's shadow is just as prominent. "Pearl Cadillac" is a gorgeous, sultry ballad built around Clark's falsetto, with both the arrangement and lyrics recalling the Purple One without turning into imitation. Bonus track "Dit Dat" visits the same territory from a lighter direction, driven by slap bass and a playful funk groove. Elsewhere, "The Guitar Man" reaches toward the sophisticated late-seventies soul of Marvin Gaye, while "When I'm Gone" sounds older still, its beat and vocal melodies carrying the unmistakable imprint of Motown.
The remarkable thing is how naturally Clark can move between these influences. "What About Us" picks up the tempo with a clipped, almost metallic riff and a swagger reminiscent of late-nineties Lenny Kravitz. "I Walk Alone" puts Clark's soulful falsetto over a heavy guitar figure before opening into a beautifully echoing solo that ends far too soon. "Low Down Rolling Stone" is darker and heavier, its crushing power chords and ominous organ giving the song a sense of impending trouble.
Then Clark starts pulling the record apart.
"Gotta Get Into Something" abandons the slow-burning soul atmosphere for three minutes of primitive garage rock, charging forward on a frantic beat and a deliberately crude guitar part. "Got to Get Up" heads somewhere else again, into psychedelic space-funk punctuated by bright horn stabs. "Feelin' Like a Million" rides a swinging reggae rhythm with electronic percussion, yet somehow remains part of the same sonic world. Clark throws little guitar phrases into the spaces around the beat, teasing the instrument rather than allowing it to take over.
That restraint is one of the album's most interesting qualities. Clark's reputation was built largely on his guitar playing, and he knows listeners are waiting for him to unleash it. Frequently, he refuses. The guitar becomes another component of the arrangement rather than the reason for the song's existence. When he finally does cut loose, it means something.
Bonus track "Highway 71" is the obvious example. A spacey instrumental reminiscent of Little Axe around The Wolf That House Built, it finally gives Clark room to stretch out, and his playing is absolutely killer. After an album spent repeatedly keeping his most obvious weapon holstered, hearing him let the guitar roar is enormously satisfying.
There are also moments when Clark strips away the modern production almost entirely. "The Governor" is rustic acoustic blues built around his slide playing, a song that could conceivably have been recorded decades earlier. Closing track "Dirty Dishes Blues" goes further still, ending the main album with its most traditional blues performance. The guitar sounds fantastic, Clark's vocal is equally strong, and after an hour of processed instruments, electronic textures and genre-hopping production, its relative simplicity feels refreshing.
Those songs also reveal how deliberate the rest of This Land is. Clark knows traditional blues intimately and can play it exceptionally well. He simply doesn't want to live there permanently.
That ambition occasionally works against the album. At more than an hour, This Land is too long, and despite the range of genres involved, its reliance on slow tempos, dense production and similar vocal textures can make the middle stretch feel surprisingly uniform. "Don't Wait Til Tomorrow", for example, is another atmospheric slow soul number with percussion and an odd, intrusive sampled sound hovering in the arrangement. It's a good track and the chorus eventually gives it some lift, but by that point the album has already explored similar territory several times.
A few songs also feel as though their production and performances are doing more work than the compositions themselves. Clark has created an extraordinarily cohesive sonic environment, perhaps too cohesive at times, and tightening the track list would have made the strongest material hit harder. There is a great fifty-minute album inside this sprawling hour-plus one.
But excess is easier to forgive when an artist is reaching this far. This Land draws heavily from the history of Black American music, particularly the psychedelic funk of Cosmic Slop-era Funkadelic, the elegance of Curtis Mayfield, the sensuality of Prince and the soul tradition that came before all of them, while sounding unmistakably like a record made in 2019. The guitars are processed, the drums hit with modern weight, electronic sounds creep into arrangements and Clark treats genre boundaries as suggestions.
Gary Clark Jr. was once sold as a man who might carry the blues-rock guitar tradition into another generation. This Land finds him with considerably bigger ambitions. The blues remains part of his language, but so do soul, funk, reggae, punk, psychedelia, hip-hop and modern R&B. The album occasionally buckles under the weight of all those ideas, and a more ruthless edit might have turned an excellent record into a great one. But its imperfections come from Clark trying to expand his vocabulary rather than settling comfortably into the role that had already been prepared for him.
On This Land, he sounds like an artist determined to define himself before anybody else gets the chance.
GENRE: Blues
RELEASE DATE: February 22, 2019
PRODUCED BY: Gary Clark Jr. & Jacob Sciba
LABEL: Warner Bros. Records
RATING: 8/10