For those in the know, seeing Jim White’s name on the credits has been the mark of a quality album for something like forty years. If the Australian drummer has a day job, it’s his role as founder-member of instrumental post-rock legends Dirty Three, along with guitarist Mick Turner and violinist (and sometime Bad Seed) Warren Ellis, but the idea of a settled occupation for someone as protean and collaboratively-minded as White is somewhat redundant. Over the years, he has joined forces with the likes of Bill Callahan, Cat Power, Phosphorescent, Marisa Anderson, Mess Esque, White Magic, Sun Kil Moon and countless others. His partnership with Greek laouto player George Xylouris has produced five stunning albums, and most recently, he has been spotted with the latest band of Malkmus-led misfits, The Hard Quartet.
Last year, at somewhere north of sixty years old, White finally released a solo album. Instead of pursuing the traditional singer-songwriter route, All Hits: Memories saw him choose to use the freedom afforded by his newly unchaperoned status to experiment with condensed and highly expressive percussive miniatures. Inner Day is a slightly different beast. Those drum explorations now seem like the groundwork for a much fuller and more detailed musical document, an album where the keyboard comes out of its shell, an album that includes voice and even a guitar, courtesy of Zoh Amba.
The duet with Amba – I Don’t Do/Grand Central – seems like a good place to start. The playful, semi-spoken verbal back-and-forth is pitched somewhere between the pranksterish freak-folk hijinks of the Fugs or the Holy Modal Rounders and the partly improvised art-house happenings envisioned by Yoko Ono and the Fluxus group. White, for so long silent behind his drum kit, proves an engaging vocal presence, and Amba takes up her part with evident glee. On the title track, the other song featuring White’s vocals, we are treated to a near-whispered monologue that is both soothing and self-referential.
White ditches the drums entirely on impressionistic miniature The Blinded Bird, and on opener Deathday, a minimal but evocative stream of keyboard notes run together like a fluid. On What’s Really Happening, the keys and percussion are cut from the same rhythmic cloth, giving an insight into White’s creative process: even when the drums take a back seat, their influence can be felt. Two Ruffys sees a skittering drum part rain down blows on a sedate and almost meditative keyboard melody, before a stately fanfare of chords comes along to break up the party, while The Titles doubles down on the minimalism, with the simplest of keyboard refrains providing the leafless tree around which White’s bird-like drum fills can flit.
The mood is slightly more sinister on Longwood with its pounding, stop-start drums and eerie, almost hauntological-sounding keyboards. Cloudy’s percussion sounds like a galloping insect, and its keyboard melody gulps and swoops, and Stepping has a slow and almost theatrical percussive build that owes a lot to White’s forays into post-rock. Much of the album, in fact, is defined by this clever, controlled use of tension, which is at its most evident in the contrast between the two primary instruments: when the drums are intense, the keys are soothing; when the keys leer and lour, the drums become intricate or quietly prickly.
It’s an impressive balancing act, and every aspect of it is on show in the ten-minute 11.12.24, which seems like a journey from uncertainty to a kind of transcendence, the drums picking out a needle-strewn path through uncanny and often beautiful melodic landscapes. The balance on Thanksgiving (Three Dead Walls) is between busy drums and sedate chords. However it is achieved, there is always the sense of something hanging in suspension, the sense of a discovery on the verge of being made. White navigates wonder and trepidation in a way that is mightily refreshing, particularly for a musician who has been in the game since the early 1980s. And you get the feeling that this is still just the start.
Inner Day (October 24th, 2025) Drag City
Order/Save: https://jimwhite.lnk.to/innerday