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Elegant folk songs sung with heart and arranged with sensitivity.
Before we begin: no, this is not the Jim White who is famous for having worn a yellow tie on Sky Sports News coverage of transfer windows, nor is it the Jim White who wrote a biography of Manchester United. This is the Americana artist whose debut album inspired a BBC4 documentary about the American South.
White helps bring to a wider audience the music of Trey Blake, a Brighton-based artist who enlisted the assistance of Joe Watson from Stereolab to turn her ideas into music, which sounds like a BBC4 documentary précis. You’d imagine that any live performances of the album will run it as sequenced on the record, from top to tail.
If you like to graze on your music, stay away, because this is haute musical cuisine: each of the five tracks by Jim and the five by Trey, which appear in a Jim-Trey pattern across the album, runs between five and eight minutes. The seven-minute opening track ‘Ghost Song’ puts us in the middle of things with the line “I fell off a bridge”; it is suitably spectral, with the kind of instrumental passage that belongs in a TV drama set in the woods, which in turn is followed by a spoken word verse.
Trey has a voice that recalls Stevie Nicks’, with apologies for what must be the 932nd time it has been described this way. She contributes ‘Rushing In Waves’, a meditation on love in a folk mode, and ‘One Last Love Song’, which unfurls across several verses and includes the prolix but poetic lyric: “pure naked moonlight shining on the silver of the barbed wire around my heart”.
It’s not clear if it was part of the sonic mood of the album to use very similar chords across several songs, mainly I, III and IV; perhaps this is to foreground the poetry and the stories. All the same, it was notable when drums kicked in during ‘The Long Road Home’, the album’s first single, which White sings with a touch of Nick Cave on his voice. Ditto ‘My Time With The Angels’ and its macabre musical setting.
White’s other two copyrights are ‘Down To The River We Go’ and ‘Tumbleweed Time’. The former is another song whose mood matches the lyric, where the vocals are shared between the singers to end the first side with a flourish. The latter opens up into a melodic chorus after verses that are half-whispered over very sparse acoustic guitar chords. Trey, meanwhile, provides the album with ‘His Lady’, which has another fine wind solo which is underscored by a glockenspiel, and ‘Midnight Blue’, on which she shows off her tremulous vibrato and to which White adds countermelodies on the melodica. Album closer ‘Ballad of the Gunfighters’, also written by Trey, opens with forlorn harmonica and unsurprisingly ends with some of the characters going to “the arms of night”.
This is an hour of excellent folk songs which is helped by being sung by two bards.