im White, by any normal standards of measure, has lived a storied life. The man has, at various points in his career, been a professional surfer, a professional model, and a taxi driver. If you’ve never heard of him before, he may sound like a custom built recipe for the newest member in one of the plethora of pop punk bands populating the California coast- getting sponsored by surf ‘n skate clothing labels and singing about how they’d never choose a girl over their bros. In actuality, Jim White creates a soundscape distinctly backwoods in origin and prefers a cowboy hat to spiky blond hair. Which is not to say he sounds exactly like country or folk music either; he doesn’t sound quite like anything else out there, really, and in his case, it’s a good thing.


No Such Place is an album with a range of influences from across the musical spectrum. When released in 2001, No Such Place received a lot of attention for the eclectic mix of producers White selected for the album, including Sohichiro Suzuki of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, Q-Burns Abstract Message, members of Morcheeba, and Andrew Hale (of Sade fame). No Such Place further carves its own unique niche with the extra elements included in the music. Faded church bells, muted sirens, insect noises, white noise, rickety turntable scratching, and electronic beats take “alternative” country music to places it’s never been before. While all this sounds as though it could be a cheesy attempt at thoroughly modern gimmickry, it rarely comes across as forced or unnecessary. It is, at times, a little slick when compared to some of White’s contemporaries, or even his 1997 debut Wrong Eyed Jesus, but the enhanced production is thankfully more a case of an ambitious artist attempting to expand his sound than it is of an artist attempting to get radio play.


The most obvious touching points, in spite of the array of unconventional producers, are traditional country western music and Appalachian folk music. A majority of the songs on the album are rooted in the strong heritage of pain, loneliness, and pure storytelling found in those genres, and White quite intentionally puts some country twang and southern drawl into his vocals. White, though, tends to be a lot more tongue-in-cheek, more abstract, and certainly more modern with his lyrical content. No Such Place, for example, includes two songs featuring a rundown Corvair in his back yard, which transform into an unexpectedly poetic correlation to his soul when he quietly sings “got a Corvair in my yard / it hasn’t run in fifteen years / it’s a home for birds now / it’s no longer a car,” only to be followed by “got a simple friend out west / and in the blink of an eye / I’d swap him straight, his life for mine / and never wonder why.” Pretty powerful stuff, and not of the variety you’re likely to hear on a Johnny Cash album, or even in the output of more modern contemporaries like Palace Brothers or Wilco.


While not all of the songs on No Such Place are equally as haunting as “Corvair”, they are all equally as honest. Even the more light-hearted songs contain lyrics that cut to the bone with their introspection. Take the album’s opener, “Handcuffed To A Fence In Mississippi,” which is a rollicking number musically, replete with sha-na-na background harmonies, jaunty organs, upbeat banjo picking, and even a funk guitar lick in the bridge. Yet, against this sunny backdrop, White interjects the thought that “for in the prison of perpetual emotion / we’re all shackled to the millstone of our dreams / me, I’m handcuffed to a fence in Mississipi / where things is always better than they seem.” White delights in this kind of juxtaposition, absurd on some levels and smacking of truth on others. The irony reaches a climax on “God Was Drunk When He Made Me,” the most traditional-country sounding of all the tracks on No Such Place. White absolutely drawls “God was drunk when he made me / that’s why I’m so crazy.... / God was drunk when he made me, but that’s okay / because I forgive Him.”


White also proves to be fully capable of taking his strange and often poetic lyrics to places of true beauty. "Christmas Day” is a soft-spoken account of a lost love that was found again briefly at a Greyhound station on Christmas day in 1998, “so seldom a door / so seldom a key / so seldom a hit like the hurt you put on me.” White is equally moving on “Bound to Forget,” a slow-burning, atmospheric song about outrunning the past, “travelling faster than the speed of regret.” But the beauty that White is capable of is perhaps best demonstrated on “Wrong Kind Of Love,” in which White pares down the essence of so many romantic relationships to a few words. The symbolism present in other songs is immediately present when he intones “nothing is prettier / than a pretty girl / digging a heart-shaped hole in the ground ,” but nothing could be more direct or more true than “her affection for affliction’s just sleight of hand / a stolen picture taken from some loving fool / who just like you, mutely surrendered / ...she wants the wrong kind of love / but you can’t hold that against her / ‘cause if that’s the kind of love she wants / then that’s just the kind of love you’ll have to get her / ... because you never felt nothing so real or right as this wrong, wrong kind of love.” Lyrics like these define human nature more effectively than a hundred philosophy books or a thousand Dashboard Confessionals.


In the end, it is White’s affinity and understanding of the human condition that makes his songs resonate. No Such Place could easily have slipped into the trap of artifice due to the new sonic territory that White brings to the genre, and White could easily have permitted himself to be casually labeled something like a generic “singer/songwriter” or “folk revivalist.” White transcends these pitfalls with pure sincerity, insight, and beauty. No Such Place is an excellent album; at times gothic, at times bizarre, and at times, absolutely stunning. His vision is unique, and his motives are perhaps best summed up by these words, printed on the inside cover of the album: “what my ‘eye’ sees...is this not the ‘truth?’”