the of mirror eye

* Nina Nastasia & Jim White: I’ve Been Out Walking (4.5 mb) | The Day I Would Bury You (4.0 mb) | I Come After You (4.5 mb)
From You Follow Me : Fat Cat Records : FATCD53

I’m just gonna go ahead and say it out right. This album, by Nina Nastasia and Jim White (of Dirty Three fame) contain songs with a capital S. Always an amazing songstress, the lovely Ms. Nastasia has really outdone herself with this collection. The writing is deeply nuanced and accomplished, and speaks of love, pain, joy and the simple things in life. Buoyed by the amazing drums of Jim White, the album is truly amazing.

With Nina’s extraodinary voice able to swoop and turn on a dime, to shift from a langorous, breathy trail to beautifully emotive peals or a bloodied howl, Jim’s highly inventive playing (the word drumming seems a somehow inadequate or lazy to description) is simultaneously loose and lithe, intensely tight, testing and marking out the spaces around things; changing weight from a dissipated shimmer to explosive shrapnel bursts or weird machine-flurries – both functional and impressionistic. What results from the meeting is a series of songs that emerge in a process of almost continual invention. They unfurl and stretch out, expand and contract, always fluid and organic – as though the songs themselves were living and breathing entities. The space hewn out is in flux and deeply three-dimensional, an almost cubist commingling of events, perspectives and possibilities. The more you listen, the more you pick up. With the recordings close-up and sensual / visceral, it’s a passionate, emotive album articulating a spectrum (both lyrically and musically) that ranges from driven rage to a loving sensual warmth. (Fat Cat)

Although Jim White has been a part of her backing band for a number of albums, this album, by paring the ensemble down to just guitar, voice and drums, sees his contributions pushed, with great effects, to the forefront. He’s an amazingly expansive drummer and it’s awesome to hear him stretch out here and really push these songs to the edge. Here’s hoping that we haven’t heard the last from this duo.

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