Description:	Oh cool it's a new LP on Drag City
	Format:	LP (vinyl)
	Genre(s):	Experimental Indie
	Label:	Drag City
	Price:	£12.09
	Availability:	In stock. Dispatched in 1 working day.

5
...according to our Brett on 27 August 2009.

Drag City mainstay Jim O'Rourke's returned to his Nic Roeg obsession (see Bad Timing, Eureka and Insignificance) for new LP The Visitor, which takes its name from David Bowie's character in The Man Who Fell to Earth and is billed as a kind of sequel to Bad Timing. It's easy to see why, with its mixture of neo classical elements and vaguely country-sounding instrumental Americana a dead ringer for parts of that LP. For all his lovely guitar work and wonderfully expressive bar room style piano playing I think the magic's really in the production on this one. It's sequenced as one long track, presumably (since it's been so long between full solo LPs) from snippets written and recorded over the course of several years so it almost seems like he's worked a miracle in producing such a singular effort and engineering it to flow so naturally. As ever he does a fine job of mingling the avant garde with the purely listenable and in no way is this a difficult album to appreciate. Fantastic!

Love this record? Hate it? Tell us.

What their label says...

‘The Visitor’ is the 1st new Jim O’Rourke record in eight years! All-instrumental, ‘The Visitor’ is a
sequel to ‘Bad Timing’, the record that started Jim on the path to pop stardom way back in 1997.

‘The Visitor’ is a seriously all-Jim O’Rourke affair - all
the sounds you hear are Jim and Jim alone. This time
you can’t blame any of those session dudes and their
bloodless line readings - the chill you’re getting is a onehundred
percent O’Rourke effect. As a matter of fact, it
might be more like two hundred percent — some of ‘The
Visitor’ is tracked so deep, it took two hundred tracks to
hold it all. It doesn’t sound like it though - to Jim’s
credit, the mix sounds very minimal, very straightforward
- not like several hundred tracks at all.

All the classic O’Rourke-isms are here: percolating
banjos, smooth electric leads, organic, kicking
drum sounds, the flickering of shakers to the left
and right, mellow but ominous woodwinds,
sounds that indicate ‘vintage’, sonic jokes and
sonic tear-jerkers, all wrapped in spacious yet subtle
left to right placement of everything in the picture.

This is one one-track album everyone’s gonna have to
buy. However, ‘The Visitor’ doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Get ready for redefinition - Jim O’Rourke is back.