We're excited to announce that TRIXIE WHITLEY's debut album, FOURTH CORNER, will be released in the US on January 29, 2013, and plan for a European release on February 11, 2013.

One of our favorite tracks off of this new album is "Breathe You in My Dreams," which you can stream NOW on SoundCloud here:

TRIXIE WHITLEY
“Fourth Corner” (Strong Blood)

Pain, desire, rage, sorrow, determination and loneliness course through Trixie Whitley’s bluesy moan on her debut album, “Fourth Corner.” She’s haunted in ways both elemental and cerebral.

Ms. Whitley, 25, is the daughter of Chris Whitley, the hard-living Texas bluesman who died in 2005; she grew up hearing him perform in studios and onstage. But Ms. Whitley, whose mother is Belgian, also spent years as a member of theater and dance troupes in Europe before moving to New York City in her teens.

After she made an EP Ms. Whitley joined Black Dub, the producer and guitarist Daniel Lanois’s group, which released an album in 2010. The group’s smoldering grooves and reverberant guitars were a perfect fit for Ms. Whitley’s own instincts, but she’s even more radical on her own.

Her mercurial, dramatic songs aren’t tied to the standard forms or plain rhetoric of the blues or pop. Her melodies hop and swoop asymmetrically, and most of them ride choppy patterns of distorted guitars, played and layered by Ms. Whitley, that circle and seethe until she’s sung all she needs to say.
“Hotel No Name” has the buzzing, roaring guitar of Neil Young and Crazy Horse; while “Silent Rebel Pt. 2” hints at Eastern modes. “Need Your Love” ticks and claws like a Radiohead track, reaching its pleading chorus — “I need your love/I need to feel with you right now” — by way of considerably less clear-cut verses:

Living in the depths of our constellation
With saviors I’ve dared not see
I’m living off of deprivation
Tomorrow may not be.

Now and then, when guitars give way to keyboards (played by Ms. Whitley’s co-producer, Thomas Bartlett), she has a more straightforward soul side, approaching Alicia Keys territory. Steady keyboard arpeggios and a moody backdrop of strings carry the album’s first single, “Breathe You in My Dreams,” a confession of solitary longing that crests in an urgent call and response.

Last year Ms. Whitley released solo versions of four songs from the album on an EP, “Live at the Rockwood Music Hall.” But in the studio she and Mr. Bartlett have made them darker and eerier; strings, electronics and percussion add new shadows and implications. Her are as much philosophical as personal: “Condemned in the eye of a sleeping mind/Wearing out the window of time,” she sings in “Fourth Corner.” Yet even when she’s inscrutable, she’s passionate. JON PARELES

The European version of the album (to be released in February) includes 4 bonus tracks:

• Like Ivy [from the OOP download-only Noisetrade Mixtape, also available on the Like Ivy EP]
• Strong Blood [bonus download from the Trixie Whitley store, not the same version found on the Live At Rockwood Music Hall EP]
• A Thousand Thieves [from the A Thousand Thieves 10-inch vinyl release]
• I'd Rather Go Blind [feat. Daniel Lanois and Brian Blade, from The Engine EP and the I'd Rather Go Blind 10-inch vinyl release]