You go into a store to buy a record, a magazine or a t-shirt and at the cashier they hand you a bag containing a vinyl record. You ask what it is. “I can't tell you, the boss said to give it to everyone.” That's what happened to those who made purchases on Friday at Third Man Records stores in Detroit, Nashville and London. The kind gift is a vinyl composed of 13 songs and a short instrumental with no title (at least for now) or credits. It looks like a proof of the press. The only writing that appears on the label is “No Name”. In the center of side A of the vinyl is written “Heaven and Hell”, on the other side “Black and Blue”, like the albums of Black Sabbath and the Rolling Stones. Catalog number TMR-1000.
To understand that it was a Jack White record, people had to put it on the turntable. It's not only an original way to release an album, the musician's first since the double in 2022 Fear of the Dawn / Entering Heaven Alive. It's not just a marketing ploy to get people talking about the release in a context saturated with new releases that are exciting on Friday and already forgotten on Monday. It's a way to evoke the rock mystique that has been lost in this time in which everything must be transparent and the sense of community typical of the old underground has been lost.
As the folks at Third Man Records wrote on Friday night, reposting photos and reactions from those who had gotten their hands on the vinyl, this mysterious object can create a “wonderful communal experience of sharing the excitement and energy that comes from music and art.” It's both naive and seductive because it plays on a romantic idea of rock music.
No Namelet's call it that, is also and above all a return to garage rock and that is to White's roots that are rooted in the blues, in its reinterpretation at volume 10, in the repertoire of bands from the '60s and '70s considered footnotes in the history of rock and instead endowed with an energy untraceable in the mainstream. It is an album of great riffs rather than carefully composed songs. You have the impression of hearing musicians who plug in the jacks and start playing for the pleasure of making exciting and fun music, without the thought of recording songs that we will remember in ten years, which in fact are not in here. If you like the genre, it is one of Jack White's best solo albums.
The musician puts aside certain singular constructions of the past, when his being an author endowed with great musical intelligence had given life to whimsical, flashy, eclectic records, with iridescent and irregular musical forms. To this sort of cubism No Name opposes a return to the neoprimitivism of the White Strings, made more powerful and varied by doses of hard rock and fleeting almost prog moments. It will please those who consider certain things Boarding House Reach And Fear of the Dawn too cerebral. And so this bizarre and seemingly minor vinyl might be exactly what many fans wanted to hear.
It's an album of formidable riffs often Led Zeppelin-like (see the fourth piece on the first side) or punk-rock (the sixth), it is made of great dynamics (hallelujah) despite the few elements used. The energy is always high, there are no great choruses, but deadly specials, very short solos, exciting accelerations, fabulous timbres (for example the second song on the B-side). There is an almost ferocious energy and the pleasure of offering a performance that seems to be done mostly live in the studio. Here and there White seems moved by a preacher's fervor, like when he plays the role of Archbishop Harold Holmes. He seems to express the frustration and the search for freedom in a world where we are alone and disoriented, where God is dead and there are no more truths, only opinions.
No Man It also reinforced the reputation of Third Man Records stores as places “where magic happens.” The operation reproduced the feeling you once had of finding records you knew nothing about, when the world of music was not just a click away. And it reaffirmed that the label and its stores are well-defended fortresses of analog against the overwhelming power of digital. It's not just a question of media or audiophilia, but of devotion to music, which is increasingly devalued and reduced to interchangeable content, to be consumed quickly. Around rock, White is telling us, there should be a community and at best a mystique, the same, for example, that surrounded the famous bootleg with Bob Dylan's '60s recordings Great White Wonderthat one is all white too.
It is fitting that this Willy Wonka with rock instead of chocolate reminds us of this, an eccentric, very rich American who embarks on useless enterprises such as sending a record player into the stratosphere, but who is also capable of investing in the diffusion of little-known or endangered music, from blues to southern new age. White is the man with no name of contemporary rock, to quote Sergio Leone's Clint Eastwood who in the United States is known by a nice coincidence as the Man with No Name. He is an anti-hero of few words, an outsider animated by his own personal sense of justice.
No Name raises more questions than answers for now. Who plays on it? Will it become an album with a title? What's behind it? Third Man Records says to stay tuned, that something will happen, maybe an official release. In the meantime, the label has invited fans to copy and freely distribute the album, but not before telling seven friends, a saying in the United States, but also a quote from the fifth song on side A. The immediate and utilitarian sharing of today and the community sharing of yesterday, based on word of mouth.
This wild and furious, charged and desperately retro (but fortunately not nostalgic) album reminds us that the overabundance of stimuli in the digital age is harmful, that the culture of numbers is unhealthy (there is a very strong and ironic piece that seems to have been written from the point of view of a rock band), that it is preferable to look for a piece of identity not in best sellers, but in small artisanal projects. That without the romantic mystique of rock we are all a little more alone. With a little imagination and perhaps forcing the words, I would say that Jack White sings precisely about this in the last track: “How do you feel when you've tried it all? How do you see when you've seen it all?”. Archbishop Holmes, teach us about analog life.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
