Jim Neversink

Shakey is good.

The oddly dissonant opening track is the embodiment of the album name – shaky, in the sense of judderingly beautiful, and good. Damn good, in a way that makes you imagine someone has taken a zombie Johnny Cash and stuck an electrode up his arse to reanimate him. No, that’s wrong – it’s more like someone playing Giant Sand on the wrong speed, except it’s the right speed.
But enough vain attempts to reduce Jim Neversink to inadequate metaphor. Thirteen tracks of richly layered country, Shakey is Good is brimful with fine musical moments, and superb lyrics. As with all great songwriting, you can dip into the songs and find enjoyment in the moment, or luxuriate in the longer narrative experience. Which I guess is a way of saying that a pop sensibility can be broken in to serve a higher country end.
Anybody who can come up with a term like “Versace Dutchies” is worth a listen or two, and an awkward chorus like “another Swedish exchange program,” would normally only be achievable by a Bob Dylan. There are moments of Sparklehorse brilliance, and there’s a Jim White feel to the strange tales of peri-urban paranoia and quixotic questing.
Unfortunately, my advance copy of Shakey is Good has no liner notes, so I can’t tell you who plays what where, but I can tell you how. Gorgeously, with drumming that bites its way into your brain, and lap steel guitar that pins your eyelids open and stamps landscape prayers all over your eyeballs.
I’m guessing it’s the same band that brought us Jim Neversink’s debut album, with its stand out track, “Western World.” There’s something deliciously ironic about a Joburg band playing country, and it’s this kind of self-deprecating awareness, with which a band like Three Bored White Guys also flirts, that gives Jim Neversink’s self-described Loserbilly its special quality.

(First published on Channel24)

Image stolen from Isolation, one of the best music blogs around.