SHOTGUN JIMMIE - Transistor Sister

Jim Kilpatrick, as he's known to his friends and family, has been at it a while now, and with the delivery of his fourth solo record he's taken all that he's learned over the last decade and distilled it down to make his most compact and impressive record to date. Clocking in at exactly 30 minutes, over the course of 16 tracks the Sackville, New Brunswick resident covers a lot of ground in not a lot of time. Granted, some of those tracks are nothing more than the sound of someone running up a flight of stairs (the aptly named "Confidence Lodge Stairwell Recording #1") or a recording of a beautiful, but very short, few bars of piano playing ("Piano"). The rest of the album, however, is made up of actual songs, including some of his best work yet.

Fans will be happy to hear the same Jimmie they've come to love—you could say he's still Jimmie—but there are a few treats in store for those who listen closely. He's cleaned up his sound since his last album, 2009's aforementioned excellent but scrappy Still Jimmie, moving from a lo-fi basement approach to Confidence Lodge Studio in Riverport, Nova Scotia. As he did on his first three records, on Transistor Sister Jimmie hooks up with a different group of musicians to help flesh out his one-man-band sound. This time around he's joined by Ryan Peters of Ladyhawk and Jay Baird, who moonlights in everything from Do Make Say Think to Feist's live band. Taking inspiration from his Sackville surroundings ("Too Many Flowers" and "Swamp Magic) to a recent European tour ("The King of Kreuzberg") and memories of his youth ("The Hazy" and "Suzy," with its delicious verse, "I used to walk Suzy home from school/she painted my portrait in a red vest/her parents always had lots to eat in the fridge/it was where I first saw Stop Making Sense"), Transistor Sister contains some of Shotgun Jimmie's best songs.