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	CHRIS WHITLEY Troubadour Nosferatu

Chris Whitley stands on Club Passim’s spare stage like a troubadour Nosferatu, a black T-shirt pulled tight over his Iggy Pop torso and a guitar hung at his hips. Although the room is sold out, Whitley seems almost alone with his music. And his delivery says he enjoys it that way. He unveils stories that play out as dark stream-of-consciousness poetry, tales of whores and junkies and convicts sung in a style that’s so personal, at times it’s almost impenetrable.

Whitley’s eyelids slide down as he leans toward the microphone, switching among a half-mumble, a harsh whisper, and an arching manner of phrase that builds in register and intensity to a keening falsetto inspired by the bluesman Skip James. His playing often balances speedy surges of picked-and-frailed rhythms with quavering low sustained tones and sour atonal chords that underline the anxiety in his lyrics. The blur and the repeated themes of his six-string attack can threaten to become numbing, but blended with the buzz of his voice, they create a momentum that has a hypnotic grip. At its best, Whitley’s musicianship becomes a nexus of Delta blues and Led Zeppelin — especially when he alternates small explosions of slide with the ascending chordal runs that were a hallmark of Zeppelin’s acoustic performances.

His stage patter is as introverted as his song delivery. He speaks to the audience just a few times, mostly to apologize for having to retune his vintage electric solid-body and a pair of resonator guitars — which look to be a half-century or more old — between almost every number. Then he’s back in his own world. All that doesn’t necessarily make for easy listening unless you’re willing to be hypnotized by the muted light each song shines into the cave of his psyche.

It wasn’t always that way. Whitley arrived as a distinctive if more conventional troubadour in 1991 with the album Living with the Law (Columbia) and a full-blown radio hit. The disc shared "Kick the Stones" with the soundtrack to Thelma & Louise; the song was featured in the pivotal scene where Geena Davis’s Thelma beds Brad Pitt’s drifter, shedding her sexual frustration but sealing her doom and Louise’s. At the time, Whitley was more exuberant, as influenced by his blues heroes and Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page as he was by the vast spaces of the Southwest where he took refuge. More than a decade and a half-dozen albums later, his personal demons and creative inclinations have led him to less open places.

Whitley is currently touring solo behind Hotel Vast Horizon (Messenger), an album cut with a trio that he proved capable of translating to stage alone. Even positive numbers like the title track, which rang out in his February 11 Passim set, acknowledging the possibilities of love, are built on unsettling images: prison, "writhing" nightfall, implications of totalitarianism. The tone for this story was set by the low strings he bent during the song’s introduction to put a shiver in their drone. Older numbers he played, like "Poison Girl" and "Phone Call from Leavenworth," told their tales at a glance. And the new "Assassin Song" was his snapshot of his life as a touring musician. "I come from far away/Anywhere I am is home," he sang. "If you could make me stay/You’d only always be alone."

In the end, Whitley’s music, seductive as it can be to those receptive to its odd siren’s song, does seem to be about the loneliness of the inner life — that sense of being an island in the universe. The difference between Whitley and many other such strugglers is that he’s willing to entertain visitors to his deepest regions, as long as they’re willing to meet him on his own terms.