Jim White
★★★
Inner Day
DRAG CITY. CD/DL/LP
Second esoteric album from Dirty Three drummer.
You wait 40 years to record an album and two come along almost at once. ‘Hot’ on the heels of Jim White’s 2024 All Hits: Memories debut, the founding Dirty Three member (not to be confused with the equally off-beam Americana singer-songwriter Jim White) again enters his inner space to explore whatever’s randomly rattling around inside our unconscious. Accompanying his skittering drums is not just an undulating keyboard but, on the title track and I Don’t Do/Grand Central, White’s first ever lyrics. Like unconscious thoughts, many tracks move seemingly without care for the linear world, to the point of sounding entirely unfocused, but others such as Inner Day and What’s Really Happening pulse and wobble in a dreamlike yet purposeful atmosphere. Inner Day’s voyage around the edges of the avant universe might be challenging, but it can also be mesmerising.