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DRILL A HOLE IN THAT SUBSTRATE AND TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE
(Luaka Bop)
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David Lynch, meet your next soundtrack composer: Pensacola’s own fashion-model-turned-troubadour Jim White. Just as Lynch’s best films merge a cozy retro vibe with a barely explicable sense of dread, so White’s idiosyncratic songs sport an alluring surface and a creepy undercarriage. On this his third album, he continues to hone a personal style (part country, part funk, and always alert to occupants of interplanetary craft), telling shaggy-dog tales in a whisper that’s got tumbleweeds blowing through it. As titles like "If Jesus Drove a Motor Home" and "Buzzards of Love" suggest, his tongue can rest pretty deep in his cheek. But the serio-comic soil he’s tending is rich, and the pleasure he derives from the reaping is contagious — check the crafty smirk in his voice when he sings, "No vegetable, no mineral, no institution gonna disrupt the constitution of my ingenious hairdo solution" ("Combing My Hair in a Brand New Style"). Plenty of illustrious friends join in too: Aimee Mann sings back-ups on the wistful opening track, "Static on the Radio," and Barenaked Ladies provide a typically goofy rap on "Alabama Chrome," which sounds as if it were issuing from a shortwave radio attached to a barnyard. That, by the way, is meant as a compliment.
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