Kelly Joe Phelps: Slingshot Professionals

Slingshot Professionals
Kelly Joe Phelps
Ryko

With Slingshot Professionals, Kelly Joe Phelps moves away from the blues-based guitar histrionics that marked his earlier records and towards a more sedate, folkie style of presentation. And while the trademark sleepy strangeness of Phelps’s music is still largely intact (lyrically at least), overall, this record doesn’t quite work. His guitar playing is now primarily used as melodic accompaniment, instead of standing alone as a solo voice as in the past. Freed from the restraints of a blues song structure, he ventures into, but never really embraces, that sort of quiet energy that bands such as Willard Grant Conspiracy do so well. But where WGC’s music is unsettling and challenging without electricity, Phelps has sanded away almost all of his charming rough edges and left us with folk as background music. Even the presence of fellow fretman Bill Frisell or keyboardist Chris Gestrin don’t liven things up. While this is by no means a bad record, it is rather dull, and that’s the last thing we expected from Kelly Joe Phelps.

Originally published Ink 19, 2003

Jim White

Drill A Hole In That Substrate And Tell Me What You See
Jim White
Luaka Bop

Call it folk music from another planet, or perhaps redneck noir, but as inexact as those phrases are, they are as good as any for describing the music of Jim White. Eerie, fog-drenched and low-key, chock full of religious questioning and secular madness, White’s third album continues his odyssey into the underside of America. This time he’s assisted by a cast that includes Aimee Mann, Bill Frisell and Barenaked Ladies (on the energetic — well, for White, anyway — “Alabama Chrome”). The nearest musical comparison would be a southern Willard Grant Conspiracy, but White wraps his music in even more layers than do WGC. Layers that fall away on repeated listening, only to expose mysteries anew. Bizarre wordplay is the norm — take “If Jesus Drove a Motor Home”, for example — but he’s never odd just for the sake of being different. He strikes you as different because he simply looks at, and reacts to, the world in a unique and engaging manner, unlike any other performer today. Jim White will never embrace the mainstream, nor will it embrace him. Which all in all, is a good thing. He is rock and roll’s Hazel Motes, and Drill a Hole his street corner. Testify.

Originally published Ink 19, 2004