Album review: jim White, Where It Hits You

A TRUE Southern gent from northern Florida, White has finally made a record to compare favourably with his breakthrough album, 1997’s The Mysterious Tale Of How I Shouted Wrong Eyed Jesus.

Perhaps nothing can quite match the intensity of that album’s gothic horror, but his latest has a consistency his debut perhaps lacked.

Banjo and strings combine to give The Way Of Being Alone a stark whimsy, and Here We Go is a hangover from the days on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label, a gently restrained exercise in Latin joy. A serious tone is set with an opener titled Chase The Dark Away, sparked by his wife leaving halfway through the recording. More obviously, Epilogue To A Marriage directly confronts that situation, which has a haunting influence on the dark rumination of The Wintered Blue Sky.

But there is quiet relief in State Of Grace, Why It’s Cool and Infinite Mind, all of which are seriously playful. So not a break-up album in the sense of Adele’s cathartic behemoth of a record which carried all before it at the Grammy awards, but a more mature reflection on a relationship gone awry. Self-produced and assured, this is the sound of a former model and boxer taking firm control of his own music destiny. White has the lived-in look and feel of a man who came to making music late, and is now determined to make every second count.

Colin Somerville

Download this: The Way Of Alone, My Brother’s Keeper

• Jim White

Where It Hits You

Yep Roc Records, £9.99

Rating: ****