Dirt Floor

An excellent slide guitarist with a confident, veloce curviness that varies high, lonesome country with moaning country blues, Whitley unraveled his early commercial potential one album at a time. He deserves our admiration for following up his mostly acoustic debut, Living with the Law, with a pair of white-noise albums loud enough to make Sonic Youth wear earplugs. But he also lost his lucrative contract with Sony. "Dirt Floor," with a barren, desperate quality and iterative images of running (especially on the intense "Ballpeen Hammer" and the love-and-loss ballad "Loco Girl") has the same airy, blues feeling of his superb early singles. --Steve Knopper