Nina Nastasia & Jim White album out today in USA

14/08/07

"This deeply communicative collaboration with virtuoso drummer Jim White is the most solid and striking thing Nina Nastasia has ever released." Pitchfork (Recommended)

"It's a stunning half-hour of distilled fury and longing beauty, a push-and-pull with Nastasia and White taking turns as predator and prey." Bust

"It’s difficult to create something unique with just guitar and drums, but White helps Nastasia manage it on 'You Follow Me'." Paperthinwalls

"It's just a really good song. Nastasia's guitar and White's drums provide a steady base for her slightly dirgeful vocal and a chordal guitar riff that, even though it's played on an acoustic, sounds downright Zeppelin-esque." Salon.com (track review of "In The Evening")

Following last year’s critically acclaimed 'On Leaving', Nina Nastasia makes a rapid return with this stunning collaborative album with Jim White, the peerless drummer of beloved Australian instrumental trio Dirty Three. Stripped back to just a two-piece (drums, guitar, vocal), this is a fantastically focused record - a taut, raw document of two incredible musicians in deep dialogue, exploring the boundaries of songform to find a rare and striking complement.

'You Follow Me' is Nina’s second outing for FatCat, and her fifth career album; with each subsequent release, she earns further critical acclaim for the inventive songwriting she merges with a consistently haunting style. Having established a reputation as an incredibly instinctive and distinctive drummer, Jim White has become a guest musician of choice for acts such as Will Oldham, The Boxhead Ensemble, Smog, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and countless others, yet this is the first record to bear his own name. His first appearance with Nina Nastasia came at the All Tomorrow's Parties Festival in 2002, just before they recorded her 'Run to Ruin' album. He has been a perennial member of Nina’s backing band ever since, appearing with her around the world.

With Nina’s extraordinary voice able to swoop and turn on a dime, shifting from a langorous, breathy trail to beautifully emotive peals or a bloodied howl, Jim’s highly inventive playing (the word “drumming” seems inadequate or lazy) 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 visceral, it’s a passionate, emotive album articulating a spectrum (both lyrically and musically) that ranges from driven rage to a loving sensual warmth.

There’s something in the title, 'You Follow Me' - perhaps a sort of anthology of aspects of following - that adumbrates the very relationship of two musicians performing at the height of their powers, somewhere between a duel and a dance, where the leading foot shifts from movement to movement.