Jim White "Where it Hits You"
More songs of the soil...
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For every couple of hundred would-be Ryan Adamses there’s a Jim White or a Johnny Dowd. Artists for whom the term Americana is truer than most. For rather than just singer-songwriters, these people seem to spring fully formed, and draw their very lifeblood form the soil on which they walk, from which the nation itself was founded, and which gave birth to its history, its people and its politics, right or wrong.
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Having made an immediate impact with his debut, 'The Mysterious Tale Of How I Shouted Wrong-Eyed Jesus' on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label, White has enjoyed something akin to legendary status entirely on his own terms.
Taking full control of 'Where It Hits You', including the financing, he’s produced another fine set of songs, loosely referencing what we expect in terms of Americana music – gently tricking banjos, haunting pedal-steel – but ever the storyteller, the landscape painter, he colours his songs with whatever they require, led by the mood rather than the form. Musically, and in fact vocally, given his rather casual understated singing style, he comes across as a Southern Lou Reed. See ‘Sunday’s Refrain’ for evidence. But White seems less given to moody introspection, and his songs are seldom bleak, particularly on the positively jaunty ‘What Rocks Will Never Know’. Jim White then: not to be seen collaborating with Metallica anytime soon.
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