NEW ALBUMS
AMERICANA
Album of the month
JIM WHITE & TREY BLAKE
Precious Bane FLUFF AND GRAVY
Jim White: a novel inspiration
8/10
Alt.country veteran and multi-disciplinary artist pair up
JIM WHITE has tended to favour collaboration over solo work since 2020’s M i s fi t s Ju b i l e e. He turned producer for albums by the likes of Ane Diaz and Ben De La Cour, then teamed up with Tucker Martine for 2023’s Permanent Stranger, billed as Mama Lucky. His latest venture is another leftfield pairing, this time with neurodivergent artist Trey Blake.
Their association began some years back, when Blake – a longtime White fan – gifted him a copy of Mary Webb’s Precious Bane, the story of a facially disfigured woman in rural Shropshire during the 1800s. They duly struck up a correspondence (Blake in Brighton, White in New York) which eventually led to this deeply intriguing, haunting album named after the novel they first bonded over.