ROUTES & BRANCHES
featuring the very best of americana, alt.country and roots music
February 3, 2025
Scott Foley, purveyor of dust
If we've learned anything since Jim White's 1997 debut, it's that there is a world of unbelievable stories behind every one of his projects. Originally referred to David Byrne's Luaka Bop label by Joe Henry, White has traded in haunted gothic folk and country. When it hits, his songs can be visionary. In the odd occasion when they miss, it's at least interesting.
Throughout his career, White has collaborated with an impressive range of artists, from the bluegrass Packway Handle Band to Morcheeba and Shak Nasty. For Precious Bane (Fluff & Gravy), he tells the story of a happenstance meeting with Brighton writer/photographer Trey Blake, an outsider artist he has termed the UK version of Patti Smith. Encouraged by White's interest in her songs, Blake took advantage of another random encounter (with Stereolab keyboardist Joe Watson) to set her vocals to tape. Impressed by the results, he proposed they work together on a project.
The first we hear of Trey Blake on Precious Bane, the spellbinding "Rushing In Waves", she sings like a pastoral embodiment of Marianne Faithfull: She saw telegraph poles / Stretching out across the snow / Like a line of fading heartbeats / Or the feathers of a crow. With its warbles and drones, Blake's voice is striking, like a rediscovered instrument from a forgotten British folk record. She imbues the eight-minute "Midnight Blue" with a lifetime of melodrama, accompanied by White's acoustic guitar and melodica. Her untrained vocal is alien but can be gorgeous here: We're fallen angels wearing halos / Made of neon light.
White and Blake trade lead and writing credits from song to song, assuming the identity of tragically starcrossed lovers inspired loosely by Mary Webb's 1924 novel of the same name. Jim White's contributions unveil a new side of him as a writer and a performer, as well as a producer. Previous work has given him space to dip into the trad side of folk and country, but never to this extent. White says he was in an altered state of mind while he wrote "Long Road Home", a driving electric track that recalls Nick Cave. On a spoken recitation, he declares: Let me thank them girls who broke my heart / Thank you girls / Let me thank my friends who died young from drugs / Friends, you did not die in vain. "Tumbleweed Time" teases out the artist's old weird americana, adding toy piano and cello to the foreboding cut: Oh scarecrows of redemption / Why do you no longer stand guard. Blake adds spectral backing vocals to the song, mourning the busted husks of broken dreams. White's longtime admiration of Tom Waits comes to the fore on the quirky "My Time With the Angels". Atop a plinking banjo and junkyard percussion, he gives voice to a farmer who might or might not have been responsible for the death of his family: The sheriff he don't believe me / When I say it was them angels / That burned down our farmhouse / While I slept out in the barn.
The songs of Precious Bane benefit from greatly creative arrangements, from the haunted carnival of noises on "Angels" to the funereal acoustic guitar and piano of "One Last Love Song". Both Blake and White are masters of gothic folk lyricism, leaning into trad tropes while adding more contemporary details that can be dark and desolate: There's no beauty and no love, Blake sings, We're all just naked little rats, crawling underneath / The cold lonely stars above. With both artists self-identifying as neurodivergent, theirs is a fortunate coming together of talents and perspectives. Trading vocals on "Down To the River We Go", they confide: See baby, you and me so secretly / We both wanna drown.
Jim White & Trey Blake have delivered a collection that brings to mind the kind of gothic roots music that can be rare today. Originally practiced by acts like Slim Cessna's Auto Club and David Eugene Edwards' 16 Horsepower, the sub-genre has been largely tempered and subsumed into adjacent styles. On Precious Bane, the duo create from a spirit-haunted place rich with story and soul. Even enveloped in the melancholy haze, there are welcome glimpses of the sort of quirk and veiled humor for which Jim White is notorious: I flew up into Heaven / That sacred city filled with light / But no one seemed to much like me up there / So I just kept on flying, moving on / No sense in trying to belong. It's a reminder of White's worth to our kind of music, as well as an intro to an artist in Trey Blake that could possibly take us in fascinating new directions.
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