It’s a fact that there are few guitar wizards like Jack White. Most musicians would die for that kind of reputation, less concerned with the quality and consistency of their recorded output, let alone how it makes its way into the world. But White’s solo discography has been more illustrious and discourse-churning than any White Stripes fan could expect: from his identity-defining first couple of records to the experimental trilogy that began with 2018’s truly bonkers Boarding House Reach. “I feel like a magician/ But the trick’s on me,” White, whose overflow of ideas sometimes gets the best of him, sings on ‘All Alone Again’ from the just-released Frozen Charlotte, in fact his seventh album (son?). With a title referencing a traditional folk ballad about a girl who froze to death because she refused to cover her dress, the new album contains any impulse to show off but still manages to impress, stripping things down in the vein of 2023’s No Name. (Another trilogy unfurling before us?) “To find a needle in a haystack/ Well it’s plenty easy/ You just burn down the haystack,” White quips, but only offers the illusion of starting over from scratch: behind every razor-sharp lick, every precise guitar tone, is a wealth of experience.
1. G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs
“Welcome to the Garden of Eden” are the first words flying out of White’s mouth, and from there he rumbles through the Genesis story as if retelling it for the first time, with cut-throat simplicity and fervor. It almost serves to justify his back-to-basics, “Watch me rock, then I roll baby” approach, delicious from the moment he grants the forbidden fruit the taste of a power chord over squealing keys. If all it takes for White to avoid doomer territory is a little religious revisionism and plenty of guitar heroics, let us all have a blast with it.
2. Derecho Demonico
Did White come up with the line about a twister storm first, or did he make his guitar sound like a twister storm and then fit some words into it? I’d bet on the latter, though Bobby Emmett’s keyboard solo is just as wild. “I got one rule: I don’t start nothing/ Nothing that I cannot finish,” White declares. Good thing he started this one.
3. There’s Nobody There
White is his Zeppelin bag here (I’d argue Physical Graffiti-era, while also echoing his own Lazaretto), sucking all the juice from an admittedly infectious riff: humming alongside it, shouting “Aye, aye, aye,” tracing his fingers all the way around it. When he’s done repeating the line “Well, if you know me then you’ll then never love me,” it seems to set off a bomb that could end the track then and there, but it’s not long before he regains his composure.
4. Raising the Grain
It may not sound as raw as the previous tracks – not that the riff isn’t nasty, just slathered in delay – but White makes up for it with visceral, witchy language: “Girl, I will boil in linseed oil/ Crack the shellac make my blood boil.” Don’t try at home; just turn the volume up.
5. You’ll Never Fix Me
White gathers up a storm before landing on a shiny guitar lick that, true to the song’s title, hardly stays in one place. For a split second in the second verse, the bass creeps up to the foreground, enough to warrant a search of who’s playing. I’ll save you the data: Dominic Davis.
6. Nobody Knows
White gets explicitly philosophical again on ‘Nobody Knows’, pondering not so much “all the little things like where we came from or where we’re gonna go,” as he did on the opener, but human fragility. From Yuval Noah Harari’s next book: “Are the homosapiens the future aliens?” It sounds better than it reads, of course.
7. Dollar Bill
By giving space to the main guitar riff before ratcheting up the instrumentation, White sheds light not just on that particular series of notes so much as the impeccably fine-tuned effects that make it sound dizzying all its own. We don’t know what particular crime the female protagonist is accused of here, only that she did it “for the love and a dollar bill,” which fits into the album’s thematic preoccupation with vanity.
8. I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing
Frozen Charlotte falls into a bit of a slump with ‘I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing’, which has a solid foundation but doesn’t go crazy on it the way other tracks do. The final solo is good, don’t get me wrong, just slightly underwhelming following the titular lyric.
9. Thick as Thieves
The duelling guitars get the message across as clearly as the lyrics: “If you will help me become a fool/ I will receive and conceive to help you too/ Your gentle hands will take the wheel as my sticky fingers steal.” White may be playing both parts, but it takes the whole group to get the job done.
10. All Alone Again
White spends more time rapping throughout Frozen Charlotte than you’d expect, so the way he rides the melody on the strutting ‘All Alone Again’ is refreshing. It retains the album’s bite and humour but dials up the emotion, especially when it’s reduced to just his voice and nimble guitar. You’ll end up alone, he suggests, but the we is far from silent.
11. She’s in a Frenzy
You bet the song called ‘She’s in a Frenzy’ is among the album’s most ferocious, its punk spirit augmented by Patrick Keeler’s tight yet flavourful drumming. The more White sings the titular chorus, the more it scans as an act of projection, even delusion: “I’m so filled with jealousy that I can’t see what is true.” It is perhaps the only track on Frozen Charlotte that doesn’t feel impersonal in its vilification, stinging like it’s supposed to.
12. Making Contact
A year after making headlines for purchasing a cell phone for the first time, Jack White now regularly posts on social media, so the sardonic couplet of “Making contact/ Making content” doesn’t totally come from a place of detachment. Everyone’s out there making their own secret garden, putting shame on Adam and Eve.
13. Neighbors Blues
“They want to keep an eye on me/ So they can get their licks,” White sings, “I’m gonna get some of my own.” Indeed, the one that opens ‘Neighbours Blues’ is among the album’s best, spiky and ominous in equal measure. Having recently watched the HBO show Neighbors, I can’t listen to the closing track without calling to mind scenes of people hard set on keeping each other out of their backyard. Even as a person in the public eye, and for all the cynicism that pervades Frozen Charlotte, White sounds more unsettled than sympathetic. Where does that sudden drive to fence off every aspect of our lives come from? Instead of abandoning that first riff for another idea, he reinforces it by piling on more layers. In the language of rock ‘n’ roll, that’s gotta count as hope.
