Longevity in music invariably turns every new release into a referendum on the past, but Jack White has escaped the burden of living up to himself because the threat of eroding his reputation appears to invigorate him.
For nearly four decades now, he has kept one foot planted firmly in his own world while always finding new ways to rearrange the furniture. At least three bands and seven solo records later, his obsession with bending familiar concepts and skirting the edge of blasphemy has made it impossible to disengage from anything he touches. Though his debut art exhibition and lifelong penchant for upholstering recently raised questions about where music now sits among his priorities, ‘Frozen Charlotte’ slams the door on that line of speculation. He is, after all, constitutionally incapable of ever abandoning the recording studio.
Announced just one month before its release, the album thrives on White’s greatest strengths. Foremost among them is his proclivity for sneezing out infectious riffs while most of his peers struggle to forge even one with nearly the same resonance. At a time when guitar music rarely occupies headlining slots, he continues to make a persuasive case that punky blues garage rock is still viable in the right hands.
In that vein, songs like ‘Derecho Demonico’ and ‘Nobody Knows’ are constructed atop open-ended patterns that transform repetition into a vehicle for discovery instead of boxing his tinkering instincts. Drawing from the same current but coated in a grainier digital texture, ‘Raising the Grain’ stands as the tracklist’s most articulate expression of rhythm engineering.
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A traditional Jack White record, ‘Frozen Charlotte’ never sits still long enough for tedium to take root. He has always treated boundaries as milestones rather than barriers, and that philosophy also extends to the smaller details.
The line “Microphone check one-two, one-two” from the opening track employs a measured hip-hop cadence that calls back to 2022’s ‘What’s the Trick?’ By no means a rapper, the Third Man Records boss understands the role of an MC well enough to invoke that oomph with tasteful restraint before stepping back into his universe. On balance, the strings remain his native tongue and ‘Dollar Bill’ makes that abundantly clear from its introductory bars alone.
The album is also packed with material tailor-made for the lengthy instrumental tangents that routinely send White’s stage act into orbit. A condensed dose of the Raconteurs, the muscular excess of ‘You’ll Never Fix Me’ is poised to attain even greater potency than its corporeal incarnation. ‘Thick as Thieves’ and ‘I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing’ lean on the elemental drum–guitar–bass framework that has become his bread and butter, the latter wringing astonishing mileage from an economical riff before relinquishing the final cry to an exhilarating wah-wah catharsis. Each of these cuts is practically begging for a live audience.
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While the record does lose steam at times, even its connective tissue yields quiet rewards. ‘There’s Nobody There’, ‘All Alone Again’, ‘She’s in a Frenzy’ and ‘Making Contact’ certainly aren’t bland or ordinary tracks, but they do lack the flavour to entice second helpings. That slight dip ultimately prevents ‘Frozen Charlotte’ from joining the upper echelon of White’s solo work.
Positioned so close to the finish line, the three-song stretch preceding the finale briefly interrupts the record’s stride before ‘Neighbors Blues’ arrives just in time to reclaim it. Built to roam with the mesmeric elasticity of the White Stripes’ ‘Ball & Biscuit’, it perfectly captures the Detroit native at his most compelling: recursive yet constantly reconfiguring himself; capricious but never directionless.
Without dramatically rewriting Jack White’s legacy, ‘Frozen Charlotte’ anchors it firmly in place. These 13 cuts may not stand among his defining achievements, but neither do they break a spell that has endured for nearly four decades. Put simply, he remains a class apart even when he falls short of his own highest standards.
7/10
Words: Karan Singh
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