Album reviews: Macklemore asks questions on 'Unruly Mess,' various stars salute Blind Willie Johnson

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, "This Unruly Mess I've Made" (Macklemore)

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis shocked the music industry in 2014 when the hip-hop duo landed four Grammys for the album "The Heist" over the acclaimed Kendrick Lamar. Did the duo win because they were white? That was certainly the debate at the time. And it's a debate that has seemingly consumed Macklemore on the duo's follow-up album, "Unruly Mess."

"I forgot what this art's for," he raps in the opener "Light Tunnels," about his Grammy experience. "I didn't get through freshman year to drop out as a sophomore."

In the closer, the sprawling "White Privilege II," he goes even deeper, trying to figure out his place in not just the hip-hop world, but in the world in general. Macklemore recognizes that as a white man, he has advantages in both worlds and he can't figure out what to do about it. "We take all we want from black culture," he rhymes. "But will we show up for black lives?"

In the end, Macklemore remains unsure, as would be expected. His heart seems to be in the right place, especially with all the hip-hop legends lined up to help him. His skill isn't actually in social commentary, which often comes off feeling like musical after-school specials. It's in offbeat "Thrift Shop" fun and making club-bangers like "Can't Hold Us." There isn't one of those on "This Unruly Mess," by the way. The closest they get is the anthemic single "Downtown," which didn't get the attention it deserved because many were still bogged down in the racial questions surrounding Macklemore and Lewis, and the spacey "Dance Off" featuring Idris Elba.

Those songs, along with the questioning "Need to Know," go much further in securing Macklemore and Lewis' future in hip-hop than the ones where they wonder what their future should be.

Glenn Gamboa, Newsday

Johnson left behind a mere 30 songs and a towering legacy that empowered disciples ranging from Pops Staples and Bob Dylan to Led Zeppelin and Ry Cooder. Yet he is an often overlooked figure who merged gospel and blues into music of transcendent depth and feeling. He died in 1945, 15 years after his final recording.

This album pays tribute to the slide-guitar master by reaffirming the durability of his songs. An array of contemporary artists — from Lucinda Williams to Luther Dickinson — work in largely stripped-down arrangements that mirror the starkness of Johnson's original recordings. An understandable reverence prevails over most of these primarily straightforward interpretations, but a handful dig a level deeper.

Tom Waits and his family — son Casey on drums, wife Kathleen Brennan on eerie backing vocals — capture Johnson's haunted essence in "The Soul of a Man," and he summons ghosts on "John the Revelator." Susan Tedeschi's burlap-and-silk vocal textures and Derek Trucks' slide-guitar punctuations suit a back-porch arrangement of "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning." The Cowboy Junkies give "Jesus Is Coming Soon" a psychedelic afterglow, and Sinéad O'Connor finds the uneasy middle ground between a declaration of faith and a desperate plea for deliverance on "Trouble Will Soon Be Over."

It's an ambivalence that hung over every note Johnson recorded: a belief that God's love can sustain even the most wretched of human beings, shadowed by the possibility that sometimes even a sacred bond may not be enough.

Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune