You Follow Me
by Nina Nastasia & Jim White

Album details

US: 14 August 2007 on Fat Cat
UK: 28 May 2007 on Fat Cat

Singer-songwriter Nina Nastasia teams with the Dirty Three’s Jim White for a ten-song set produced by Steve Albini. White has actually backed up Nastasia numerous times in the past, but this is the first album on which he gets joint billing–suggesting a more prominent role for the drummer.

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The critical consensus

How does You Follow Me compare to past Nastasia efforts, now that the singer-songwriter has a full-time collaborator? All Music Guide sums it up thusly: "You Follow Me is worlds away from Dogs, from Run to Ruin, but picks up where [2006’s] On Leaving left off." Mojo calls it "a sharper set than its more flowing and lyrical predecessor," while CMJ says the new album is "even sparser" than normal Nastasia fare, with its "’side project’-ish" feel preventing it from matching up with her best efforts. The Onion, however, loves the album, calling it "Nastasia’s purest, most assured work yet," while Stylus calls it "a winner." Treble feels that despite the disc’s "intimate" nature, "there’s a potency to it that could rival albums played at ten times the volume." Pitchfork, too, is a fan, and finds the interplay between the two "entrancing" while producing a "stark" album whose "economy makes it all the more arresting." And CokemachineGlow feels the disc is "obviously and uniformly excellent from start to finish."

Some critics feel that the pairing of Nastasia and White produced more entropy than synergy. Chart Attack likes the album but notes that the collaborators aren’t always on the same page: "At times it sounds as though White is drumming completely oblivious to anything else that’s going on in the songs, but Nastasia’s voice has a way of tying together the resulting chaos." Exclaim! comes to the same conclusion but finds the album as a whole energergized by the "free-spirited drumming," while Crawdaddy! is disappointed to find White’s percussion interfering with what are otherwise good songs. (Dusted thinks that this very dynamic is what makes the album "engaging.") Playlouder even wonders if the two were ever in the same room, or if "tapes of each other’s playing were just posted to the bespectacled engineer in Chicago and spliced together." And Q finds the match a poorly-conceived idea from the start: "Nastasia’s songs are delicately crafted exercises in atmospheric minimalism and as such don’t require very much in the way of fancy percussion."

It’s clear that Nastasia and White made pains to ensure that every second of You Follow Me is indispensable.

- Matt LeMay, Pitchfork

Review roundup

Tracklisting and media

1. I’ve Been Out Walking
2. I Write Down Lists
3. Odd Said the Doe
4. The Day I Would Bury You
5. Our Discussion
6. In the Evening
7. There Is No Train
8. Late Night
9. How Will You Love Me
10. I Come After You

Also on the web

• Nina Nastasia @ Fat Cat Records
• Nina Nastasia @ MySpace