Xavier Rudd
White Moth

"Take Ben Harper, whiten him to make him look like Jack Johnson, give him a surfboard and send him surfing with Frankenreiter, make him play anything that makes a sound, stick a didgeridoo up his ass and voilà, you have Xavier Rudd."

More or less with these words, Mr. Rudd was introduced to me by a friend I met on the streets of Melbourne.

Smooth music, music that escapes from the speakers and seeps under your skin. Let's call it pop if we want, or, as someone said some time ago, let's just say they are simple tunes. But they are tunes impeccably made, the kind that imprint themselves on the window of a car as the road flows beneath your wheels, the kind that paint landscapes in notes.

White Moth is the latest work from the Australian multi-instrumentalist and is perhaps his best effort so far. The style is the same as his previous albums. Acoustic pop rock orchestrated in a personal way and played superbly, sometimes stepping over the boundaries into reggae and rock. Melodies of red sand, dusty like his land. The use of the slide guitar is extensive as well as that of the didgeridoo, often included in the arrangements and divinely integrated with the backdrop created by Rudd.

It is not music that pretends to be something, it simply is. After all, "being is and cannot not be, non-being is not and cannot be." If you listen to it in the right situation, Xavier knows how to deliver sensations, knows how to touch the skin with a guitar. Moving from ballads like "Choices" or "Land Right" to classy reggae like "Come Let Go" and "Twist" are signs of versatility, just as the dive among kangaroos in "Message Stick" is.

The guitar is the guiding line that interpolates the 14 songs of this postcard from Australia, seen through the rearview mirrors of a van rumbling along the dusty and wild trails of its coast. In search of nothing, contemplating.