It’s been four years since JIM WHITE’S last (2007’s ‘Transnormal Skiperoo’) but his new album ‘Sounds of the Americans’ is hardly a belated follow-up in the traditional sense.
Instead, ‘Sounds of the Americans’ features 16 songs (well, songs punctuated by arcane set pieces) from the score White and guitarist/ composer Dan Nettles (aka Kenosha Kid) wrote for the 2010 Juilliard Drama School production of the same name which celebrates the work of US literary giant Sam Shepard.
I freely confess to scant knowledge of Shepard’s work, but it doesn’t spoil my enjoyment of what is – even by White’s offbeat standards – a curious melange of moods, grooves, spoken word excerpts and the occasional Pop gem thrown in for good measure. It requires a sizeable leap of faith along the way, but it rewards the listener prepared to invest patience and courage.
Not too surprisingly for a drama-related project, much of it swings by with a cinematic bent. Jazzy, neon-lit instrumentals (‘This Little Girl’) rub shoulders with spoken word passages (‘Letter 1’) and oddball, improvised pieces form the backdrop to news reports of sabotage in Florida (‘Kitty Litter’) and redneck entrepreneurs having their noses shot off during ‘Blink of an Eye.’
Elsewhere, ‘Suckerz Promises’ marries spaghetti-western trip-hop with a weird, tobacco-chewing Tom Waits-style vocal from White. ‘Simulacrum’, meanwhile, opens in an ambient wash, drafts in a passing Zombie choir and morphs into a (cough) jazz-rock fusion workout, while the televangelical preacher on ‘Esoteric Text Found in a Religious Garbage Can’ predicts imminent alien invasion and sounds like a distant cousin of something from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s pioneering ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ LP.
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The more recognisable ‘songs’ are the glue binding the whole thing together and they’re a delight. During the jaunty ‘Rambler’, a young man lovingly re-builds his father’s old car with a sense of pride and “an arsenal of good ol’ Yankee know-how,” while on the classy piano-led blues lament guest Shayna Small weighs in with a predatory and quite wonderful vocal turn. Perhaps best of all is a happy-sad cover of Daniel Johnston’s ‘Speeding Motorcycle’: a wonderfully naive song of escape treated with sensitivity to spare which – ironically – ends up sounding like the record’s best shot at a ‘Pop’ anthem.
Although you could hardly accuse ‘Sounds of the Americans’ of being ‘cohesive’, it’s an intriguing and frequently inspiring hour-long sprawl. Countenancing everything from Jazz to Film Noir, it’s liable to rebel if you dare to peg it as a ‘Roots’-related release, but then Jim White’s never really had any truck with definable genres anyway. It’s one of many reasons why his re-emergence after a gap of four years is very welcome indeed.
Loose Music online
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