For almost his entire solo career Jack White has seemed engaged in a curious battle with his past. He didn't deny it, far from it, but he gave the impression of wanting to demonstrate that the White Stripes had only been a starting point. Each album moved the bar a little higher, between destructured blues, askew funk, analog electronics, sound collages, sudden psychedelic deviations and a taste for experimentation that often made listening as fascinating as it was challenging. He seemed like a musician incapable of stopping, almost terrified of the idea of repeating himself.
Frozen Charlotte tells a different story: that of an artist who has finally stopped considering his past as an adversary. It's a substantial difference, because here there is no nostalgia, nor an attempt to replicate the White Stripes. If anything, there is the serenity of those who understood that the paths taken over the last 15 years could easily bring them back to the starting point without taking a step backwards. The surprising thing is that right now, at the moment when White seems least interested in surprising at all costs, he returns to being the most exciting musician in contemporary rock.
Already in the previous one No Name the songs breathed of that American rock that has its roots in the blues and the great British groups of the 70s. Jimmy Page naturally continues to be a reference especially in the way White builds the riffs, transforming them into living organisms rather than simple guitar runs. But it would be limiting to stop at Led Zeppelin. Inside these songs coexist the funk anarchy of Funkadelic, the abrasive boogie of the MC5, the psychedelic freedom of a certain Detroit scene and even that almost garage-soul idea that ran through many Stax records.
Yet the result does not resemble an exercise in simple citationism. And it is here that the stature of Jack White is probably measured, who belongs to that group of great musicians who can contain enormous influences without becoming prisoners of them. He actually absorbed a language and slowly rewrote it until it became immediately recognisable. There is now a “Jackwhitian” way of understanding rock: nervous riffs, sudden accelerations, changes in perspective, guitars that seem on the verge of derailing but miraculously stay on track, an analogue production that leaves room for imperfection and a voice that continues to oscillate between those of the preacher, the bluesman and the punk.
In this sense, the album almost represents the meeting point between all his souls: the primitive energy of the White Stripes, the compositional refinement of the Raconteurs, the expressive freedom of his solo career and even that experimental madness that had characterized works like Boarding House Reach are finally brought back to a balance that seemed impossible. And overall the songs seem more in focus than in No Name, which resembled a collection of splendid sketches.
Experimentation stops occupying center stage and returns to being a tool at the service of the song, not the other way around. The singles released so far had hinted at this: GOD and the Broken Ribs, Demonic Derecho And Dollar Bills they tell of a Jack White who returns to trusting the riff, the physicality of the sound, the elementary strength of a band playing together after months of concerts. It is no coincidence that the album was recorded with the group that accompanied him on his last tour: Patrick Keeler on drums, Dominic Davis on bass and Bobby Emmett on keyboards. There is a close-knit naturalness that is rarely built in the studio and which here becomes an integral part of the final result. Perhaps the most important change, however, is another: for years Jack White gave the impression of continually wanting to surprise the listener, while today he seems interested above all in involving them. Two diametrically opposed approaches, in which in the first case it was the artist who was at the center of everything, while now the music has become the center again, which is probably the reason why this album sounds so free.
There was a time when Jack White seemed like the future of rock, today he has become a contemporary classic, one who has created a language so personal that he no longer has to prove where he comes from. Like the great authors who preceded him, he stopped chasing a canon because, almost without realizing it, he managed to build one of his own.
From a lyrical point of view, thinking for example about Dollar Billsit would even be too easy to brand Frozen Charlotte like a political record, while in reality it appears more like a record about the noise of the present, about the attempt to remain oneself in an era in which everyone talks, judges, produces content and no one seems to listen anymore. And above all it is written by Jack White who, unlike many rockers of his generation, does not act like an old man who regrets the past, but observes the present with irony, sarcasm and even fun.
If musically Jack White seems to have rediscovered the pleasure of letting rock breathe, as a lyricist he writes in a surprisingly more linear way compared to his latest works. While not giving up the surreal images that have always characterized his writing, this time he makes everything converge in the same direction. There is a common thread that runs through almost every song and it is the increasingly complicated relationship between the individual and the contemporary world, between authenticity and representation, between what we are and what we are continually forced to show. And so a title like Making Contact ends up telling the exact opposite. White plays on the double meaning of the word contentwhich becomes both a state of mind and digital content: “Feeling content / Making content / Breaking contact”. In a few lines he describes an era in which we spend our time producing content while progressively losing contact with people, only to then plunge the knife in with verses that target misinformation, large platforms and the ease with which a lie can become the truth if repeated enough times. It's one of the most openly contemporary lyrics I've written in recent years.
But the album is also crossed by a constant feeling of incommunicability. In There's Nobody There the protagonist continues to send signals, flares and messages into the void without getting any response, until arriving at that simple yet devastating line: “I'm sending smoke signals through the air, but there's nobody there”. It's the perfect image of an album full of people talking all the time without actually being able to communicate. Even when White deals with more personal topics he avoids any form of victimhood. You'll Never Fix Me thus becomes a declaration of emotional independence rather than a song about the end of a relationship, while Nobody Knows transforms doubt into the natural condition of the human being, making fun of the contemporary obsession with immediate answers.
Then there is another striking feature. Although the album is full of references to the present, White continues to write as the great rock authors have always done: he avoids direct commentary, prefers metaphors, constructs apparently absurd images that end up saying much more than any slogan. In Raising the Grain wine, blood, catacombs and carpentry materials coexist in the same symbolic universe, while All Alone Again reflects on loneliness with a wonderful paradox: “We are all alone together”.
This is also why Jack White remains one of the last great rock authors in the classical sense, because like Dylan or Lennon he writes in allegories, his lyrics do not ask to be completely deciphered. He continues to remain enigmatic, of course, but less cryptic than in the past. Maybe he just stopped wanting to prove how smart he is and started wanting to write great songs again.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
