Alabama Shakes steps out with color and confidence

Back in 2012, before Alabama Shakes' debut album, Boys & Girls, came out, I sat in a dressing room at Stubbs Bar-B-Q at the South by Southwest music festival with singer Brittany Howard, who talked about how she had gotten transported on stage into a musical "spirit world."

"I get in strange moods," the then-23-year-old songwriter and guitarist said over a plate of 'cue that she pronounced not bad, but not the equal of that made by her Uncle Orange back home in Athens, Ala. "Sometimes, I'm fearless. And sometimes, you feel like everyone is looking at you."

As much as that was occurring when the soul-rock Shakes first burst on the scene three years ago, it's all the more true now that the band's long-awaited sophomore album, Sound & Color (ATO ***), finally will be released Tuesday.

In February, the band stoked anticipation with a prime spot as musical guest on Saturday Night Live to debut two Sound & Color tunes, each of which connects musically to classic 1970s soul.

"Gimme All Your Love" eases into an emotive upper register that recalls slinky male falsettos such as Curtis Mayfield and Eugene Record of the Chi-Lites. And "Don't Wanna Fight" is a vise-tight, gritty funk salvo, with a why-can't-we-get-along message evocative of "Inner City Blues (Make Me Want to Holler)"-era Marvin Gaye.

(The latter song presents itself as a lover's quarrel, but was inspired, Howard told the Guardian, "because of people killing each other because of ridiculous assumptions. Are you a Shiite? Are you a Jew? I've started paying attention to things like that.")

The Shakes have spent the last two weekends at the Coachella festival in Indio, Calif., where - along with Madonna's surprising Drake with a wet kiss he didn't look too happy to receive, and Justin Bieber in a headlock getting carried away by security guards - the band's Friday night set the first weekend was one of the mega-festival's talking-point highlights.

That high-energy California desert gig - in which Howard performed in a Christian Joy-designed caftan inspired by those worn by the late interstellar jazz man Sun Ra - is part of a world tour that will bring them to the Mann Center on Sept. 17 with Drive-By Truckers. And along with the Flaming Lips and Jenny Lewis, the gritty foursome is one of the principal attractions at the Mumford & Sons-hosted "Gentlemen of the Road" two-day festival happening June 5 and 6 on the Seaside Heights boardwalk in Ocean County.

Produced by the Shakes with Dawes and Fiona Apple cohort Blake Mills, Sound & Color expands the palette of the band - along with Howard, bassist Zac Cockrell, guitarist Heath Fogg, and drummer Steve Johnson - at a time when the Southern soul that remains a bedrock element of their sound is fresh in the air. Last week, social media feeds were full up with tributes to the fluttery genius of Arkansas-born Al Green, who turned 69 on Monday, and the guttural power of Howard's fellow Alabaman Percy Sledge, who died at 74 on Tuesday.

The husky-voiced Howard has often been compared to James Brown and Otis Redding, though she's also been quick to point out her affection for everyone from David Bowie to the late Bon Scott of AC/DC to Conway Twitty. But although her raw power has always been evident,  Howard shows herself on the new album to be as adept with a whisper as she is with a scream.

Along with "Give Me All Your Love," other cases in point would be the delicate "This Feeling," in which Howard maintains her balance while tiptoeing along highly vulnerable emotional terrain, and the closing multitracked mood piece "Over My Head," in which she smartly resists the temptation to turn the volume up while worrying over the risks of falling desperately in love.

Of course, you don't come to the Shakes primarily for quiet contemplation. The band first commanded attention in late 2011 with Boys & Girls' rugged lead track "Hold On" in which Howard introduced herself with the surviving-adolescence couplet "Bless my heart, bless my soul/Didn't think I'd make it to 22 years old." And Sound & Color has plenty of aggressive passages, from the Strokes-y garage-rock of "The Greatest" to the extended psychedelic jam "Gemini."

When Boys & Girls was released and the Shakes first caught fire, they weren't far removed from being a bar band playing covers in clubs in the small town where they grew up an hour east of the legendary soul-and-rock recording hub of Muscle Shoals, Ala. With the charismatic Howard out front - a brown-skinned woman playing guitar and howling and shouting for all she's worth - it was immediately clear what made the Shakes stand apart. And it was also easy to imagine oleaginous music-biz types sizing up their act and concluding that, although Howard had obvious star power, the relevant question was: "Do we really need the dudes?"

One of the most satisfying developments about Sound & Color, then, is how assured a band album it is, and how all the time the group has spent touring the festival circuit has resulted in musical growth. Boys & Girls was a more-than-effective introduction, but it was also monolithic and not terribly imaginative in its steadfastly rootsy musical approach.

Sound & Color branches out as a confident, self-possessed piece of work, with impressively freewheeling but still grounded-in-the-groove excursions like "Future People" that would have seemed beyond the band's ken a few short years ago.

The first words heard on the album come on the hushed, hypnotic title track, with Howard singing, "A new world hangs outside the window, beautiful and strange." Rather than stick with what's familiar and known, and risk repeating themselves, the Shakes have taken the opportunity to leave home, and explore.

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