by Christopher J. Lee
There are arguably three kinds of drummers: those that excel at keeping the beat, those that excel at fills, and those that excel at both. This last category is the hardest to achieve, given the intrinsic tension between structure and experimentation that inhabits it. Jim White occupies this level, often venturing above it. His first solo album, wryly titled All Hits: Memories, is an exuberant and extremely intelligent work by a musician who has long paid his dues playing with other musicians like PJ Harvey, Cat Power, Bill Callahan, and his own long-term project, Dirty Three, with Warren Ellis and Mick Turner. Like many percussionists, White has often situated himself comfortably in the background. On this release, he shines.
All Hits: Memories doesn’t waste any time. With thirteen tracks at 24 minutes, White is intent on demonstrating new possibilities of percussive expression but without belaboring the proceedings through cliched rock bombast. The opener, “Curtains,” has a fast-paced, skittery, conversational quality between his drums and cymbals. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez describes a train as resembling a kitchen dragging a village behind it. In this instance, “Curtains” sounds like a kitchen assembling itself. White’s drum kit takes on a personality that is internally responsive to its different elements, as if it has a subconscious trying to get out.
The tracks that follow are equally fun. White plays with the listener’s expectations of suspense and climax on “Percussion Build,” eluding the usual timing on such rhythmic matters through prolonging conclusive gestures. “Marketplace” has the frenetic energy that the song title implies. “Soft Material” has an ambient melody with White briefly entering and leaving midway, like a culminating guitar solo (except also pointedly not). “St. Francis Place Set Up” starts with a steam engine sound, while “Walking the Block” has an ambulatory militancy. “Long Assemblage” has a cumulative quality that builds and recedes in tidal fashion. Meanwhile, “No/Know Now” retreats, conveying a Zen-like, minimalist approach. The final track, “Here Comes,” also pulls back, dwelling on the bottom end of his kit, slowly reaching a conclusion. The last sound on the LP is White putting down his sticks, as if completing another job.
All Hits: Memories is full of ideas, and there is an ample amount of showing off, which isn’t a bad thing in this case. With no vocals to speak of, it would be easy to put this album in the post-rock canon alongside releases by Tortoise and similarly oriented acts. A better genealogy, however, might be with jazz percussionists like Max Roach, Tony Oxley, or Sunny Murray. Perhaps this is what is meant by the subtitle. White sketches sound with his drum kit in a manner that approximates the experimental visual method of an artist like Cy Twombly – playful, restrained, humorous, and serious all at once.
Percussion is ultimately about time, whether tracking it, shaping it, or even concluding it. All Hits: Memories tacitly articulates what might be called a philosophy of the fill – an argument for the importance of those in-between moments in a song, which are given depth and meaning by drummers. By extension, these transitional moments exist in everyday life. On this album, Jim White appears to be saying that these contingent, liminal occasions matter, at times even more greatly than life’s big events.