Drill a Hole In That Substrate and Tell Me What You See

iTunes Review

 “It’s an allegory of the physics of my life,” Jim White says, explaining the album's title which came to him while passing a construction site one day. “The construction site is my mind, and the substrate I’ve been drilling holes in is the tangled maze of impressions that Jesus, poverty, and the loneliness of being raised an outsider in the South have conspired to lay beneath my feet.” And with that rather poetic introduction to this collection of richly literary songs (Faulkner, McCarthy and O’Connor have always haunted his works with their American-gothic overtones), you have some insight to the slightly spooky nature of White’s musings. He pens a moving love song to his young daughter in “Bluebird”, but the salvation found there is also serving to help him bury a past he’d rather forget. “Combing My Hair in a Brand New Style” is a clever account of shedding one’s skin and starting over, and the heartfelt “Land Called Home” might be sung by someone who feels he has, indeed, found a home – or at least a place in the world. It’s been a long time coming for White (this is album #3), but the musical world now seems to agree that someone important has arrived on the scene. The Barenaked Ladies, M. Ward, Bill Frisell, Ralph Carney, and Aimee Mann (who helped make “Static on the Radio” a minor hit) grace the credits, and help color in the spaces drawn by White’s sure hand. Joe Henry adds a late-night jazzy feel to a handful of tracks as producer.