His record company calls his music “Trip-folk Americana”, fans post gushing raves on his website about his poetic, “liquid country music”, and Florida-based singer-songwriter Jim White put his own two-cents in during his show at Iota Monday night, proclaiming his creations “hick-hop”. Whatever the label, White’s music is most certainly an intriguing amalgam and during his enjoyable set Monday, influences as diverse as David Byrne, the Southern gothic of Flannery O’ Connor, “Smokey and the Bandit” and 1980’s synth-popper Howard Jones were discernible.
On what he calls the “Alone With Machines” tour---he built nearly every song up with an arsenal of tape loops, keyboard samples and preprogrammed beats---White proved a deadpan performer, blithely cruising through his songs while threading electric guitar runs into their fabric. Typical of the evening’s fare were the odd religious meditation “God Was Drunk When He Made Me”, the serene wiggle of “A Perfect Day to Chase Tornadoes”, a samba-flavored dissecting of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” and his ode to optimism “Handcuffed to A Fence In Mississippi”. The only downer to White’s music was his its’ lack of brevity, nearly every song reaching the six-minute mark. But like an old-timer spinning weird tales of yore, a little long-windedness is forgivable when the strange, engaging centers were revealed.
Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin opened the show with a lovely set of Appalachia-drenched songs, several of which were drawn from her fine solo debut, “Cut Yourself A Switch”.
