(Honest Jon's Records)

www.honestjons.com

Without paying close attention, Simone White may come off as merely another quirky, delicate ingénue upon first listening. But start peeling away the outer layers and a strong, dark, and challenging artist is revealed. She sings like a beautiful bird with a broken wing. Her best songs - "Victoria Anne," "Yakiimo," and "A Girl You Never Met" - float like dreamy, acoustic-folk Americana visions atop acoustic guitars and fine fiddle playing from Billy Contreras (Robinella & The CC String Band). It's like discovering Gillian Welch has a reclusively mysterious and shy, yet somehow urbane kid sister who's finally decided to share her personal observations with the world. 

"A Girl You Never Met" is a stunningly compassionate ballad about an elderly friend who is tired of life. The lyric is so brutal and honest that after listening to it you feel you have met this ‘girl' and want to shake her yelling, "Don't do it! I've met you!" It's a dark space but there's more human understanding in this one tune than most artists amass in an entire career.

On the surface "Candy Bar Killer" is a breezy summer afternoon underscored with jangly major key indie-pop guitars and sung with a tone of innocence. But White describes the tune as being "about sordid goings-on at a teen [birthday] party." Here's the key lyric:  "There was a yellow bottle/Dropping white pills into pink lemonade/Now they call her the candy bar killer/For the wrapper she left by his side/It's such fun to be beautiful and young she cried." There's an intentionally ironic disconnect between the light tone of the music and the dark action in the lyric. It's some eerie shit and is reminiscent of Sophia Coppola's portrait of troubled girls Virgin Suicides.

One of two main issues with Yakiimo is White's style of singing. She has a wonderfully distinctive voice but too often resorts to overly stylistic "whispering." What starts out as intriguing can turn annoying if overdone. She regularly sings like "a sound trying not to make a sound." Sure, a whisper can grab your attention, but it can also annoy the piss out of you - like Seinfeld's "low talker." Generally it works for White, but the ironic pose of the coy girl/woman singing shyly about suicide, throwing kittens into a river, or burning love down like a straw house can also become annoyingly distracting when it's laid on too thick.

The other issue is that the better material on Yakiimo is so distinctive that it powerfully distracts from a significant amount of filler which, while decently performed, is perfectly appropriate for bland adult-contemporary pop radio. When White puts out an album with nothing but songs like the best ones from Yakiimo, she'll have a near-classic.  

Standout Tracks: "Victoria Anne," "Yakiimo," "A Girl You Never Met" JOHN DWORKIN