Jim White

No Such Place is the third record from Florida's Jim White, who has found a comfortable home on Luaka Bop Records, the label run by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. The label is best known for its roster of idiosyncratic "international" artists like Tom Zé and Zap Mama (Don't call it world music!), but Byrne has always had room for a few unique Yanks as well. And White is certainly unique.\nThe first thing you would want to call White's music is country. White finds himself in a tough place on the steady twang-rocker "Handcuffed to a Fence in Mississippi," which opens the record. His girlfriend has just chained him to said fence and drove off with his Trans Am. White is unfazed, as he drawls, Everything is peaches but the cream." But there's already something weird going on musically, probably because this and two other songs were produced by UK trip-poppers Morcheeba, whose laid-back beats-and-scratching approach underpin White's U.S. roots rock nicely. It's enough to make the record unique but not a blatant gimmick.\nThe album switches off nicely between more atmospheric songs like "Corvair" and country-rockers like "10 Miles to Go On a 9 Mile Road." All the songs give White an opportunity to showcase his laconic lyrical style. "Corvair" actually makes that infamous Midwestern image of a rusted-out car up on blocks in the front yard strangely beautiful. White also seems preoccupied with strange happenstance, like the story about a guy named Phillip who works in a gas station and hears strangers call his name all day when they ask for a "fill-up." \nThese sorts of genre-bending experiments are always risky affairs, and normally I would consider getting techno outfit Q-Burns Abstract Message within a mile of White a recipe for disaster. But somehow, he pulls it all off, celebrating the bizarre mix of styles without self-consciously drawing attention to them. As White says on "10 Miles," Sometimes you throw yourself into the sea of faith only to find the treasure lost in the shipwreck inside of you. This album is a shipwreck of sorts, but it's as beautiful as that Corvair in the front yard.