Archer Street in Chicago was once a short leg of US Rte 66, the near-mythical highway that once connected the Second City with Los Angeles, whose sprawl at the time of the highway's establishment was just an abbreviated teaser for the megalopolis the city has since spawned. Even though it only traversed a limited band of the country, Rte 66 was America's highway in a lot of respects, entering our popular song canon in the title of a standard, and bridging the open spaces of the West. There's no question that Rte 66 was an engine of entrepreneurship, as every town along its course offered something to the weary traveler-- in a sense, the road is symbolic of the golden age of local charm in this country, before Mobil bought every Charlie's Gas 'n' Go in sight and when The Thing? was as much an attraction as a Six Flags is today.
Rte 66 is, of course, just another ghost wandering through America's memory now (its old side road, US Rte 666, was recently assigned a new number by the Feds in a final act of indignity), but there are still outposts of that older, stranger, more charming America around drawing a curious trickle of people bored with canned amusement. Pensacola's Jim White strikes me as perhaps one of those people-- the man's own story fits in well with the inherent transience of American road life, and his music feeds off of the Pentecostal television programs he took in when he was young. White didn't get himself into a recording studio until his 40s, and by that time he had already spent time as a fashion model in Milan and mangled his hand in a bandsaw accident-- and that's when he wasn't surfing for a living.
White's music is singular, constantly fluctuating between various non-genres that mostly begin with post-, neo- or alt-. You can hear the white gospel of his youth dripping forward through Joe Henry's modern production, the record's lustrous sheen at once incongruous and oddly apropos for White's hushed poetics. There's an ambitious scope to this album as it traverses funky swamp folk, whispered electric ballads and humid country jazz, in the process conjuring that leftfield America of insane castle builders, toilet seat artists, Wall Drug and mystery spots as much as he captures Sunday evenings on the front porch and bluegrass concerts in the town square. And yet, the unvarnished fenceposts and unpaved roads of White's Americana are strangely modern, informed by the glow of Mercury Rev and Sparklehorse and Harry Smith's anthology in equal measure.
White has enough guest musicians on this, his third album, to populate any number of small towns, and the likes of Bill Frisell, Aimee Mann, and M. Ward bring a varied array of voices and capabilities to the proceedings. "Combing My Hair in a Brand New Style" is noir funk stewing gospel backing vocals in heavy wah pedal and muted trumpet, while "That Girl from Brownsville, Texas" is a whispered prayer that opens with a challenge to the being who might answer it: "God, if you ain't smilin' on me/ Then you ain't no friend of mine." The song's two-tiered chorus is beautiful and fragile, as White sets up the drifting, countrified declaration, "All I'm trying to do is plant those seeds of love/ With that girl from Brownsville, Texas," with a seesawing melody over brushed snares and steel guitar.
On the back of the promo, someone at Luaka Bop (or maybe White himself?) wrote, "These songs rise up out of a landscape of Pensacola steeples. They haunt you out. They know where you live at." That's about as apt a description as you might get without a minute-by-minute account of when the banjo comes in and where the mile-thick horn section rises up like a neon vacancy sign on the side of the interstate. These meandering piles of modern synthesizers, female backing vocals, melodicas and religiously conflicted narratives have a way of getting inside your head, and there's something about the way White whispers, "You can't waste the whole damn day," on "Objects in Motion" that just sticks with you. In the song, he first finds a suitcase full of unsent love letters floating in a river, and later discovers the body of the girl who wrote them "adrift beneath the surface of the cool, brown water."
Even as White lapses into sentimentality on "Phone Booth in Heaven", there's a gravity to it that pulls you back into his head and makes it real. And there's also the fact that you won't hear another record like it this year, possibly ever-- all the comparisons that can be made to Tom Waits, Lambchop, Grandaddy and Vic Chesnutt will only tell a small part of the story. What all these disparate elements that White pulls together add up to is White's alone, a style with no real name, American as barbecue sauce on apple pie.
