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Jack White: Lazaretto review – crushing riffs and grumpy fulminations Jack White: Lazaretto review – crushing riffs and grumpy fulminations
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Has there been a public apology more obviously delivered through gritted teeth than Jack White's recent "statement to clear up the negativity surrounding things I've said"? At risk of being accused of the "tabloid journalism" White so decries at its conclusion, it's hard to avoid the sensation there's something just a tiny little bit passive-aggressive about, say, its wilfully superfluous extending of good wishes not merely to the Black Keys, but the Black Keys' record label, the Black Keys' producer, every musician who's ever worked with the Black Keys and, in the final paragraph, literally every musician who's ever achieved any degree of success whatsoever at any point in the history of the world. Perhaps this is a terrible misjudgment of tone, but it somehow doesn't seem like the work of a man ruefully reconsidering his opinions. Rather, you somehow picturing him typing it – or writing it on palimpsest vellum with a quill or however Jack White drafts his public apologies in a suitably period manner – with his face like a beetroot and his mouth pursed in a cat's bum of disapproval.Has there been a public apology more obviously delivered through gritted teeth than Jack White's recent "statement to clear up the negativity surrounding things I've said"? At risk of being accused of the "tabloid journalism" White so decries at its conclusion, it's hard to avoid the sensation there's something just a tiny little bit passive-aggressive about, say, its wilfully superfluous extending of good wishes not merely to the Black Keys, but the Black Keys' record label, the Black Keys' producer, every musician who's ever worked with the Black Keys and, in the final paragraph, literally every musician who's ever achieved any degree of success whatsoever at any point in the history of the world. Perhaps this is a terrible misjudgment of tone, but it somehow doesn't seem like the work of a man ruefully reconsidering his opinions. Rather, you somehow picturing him typing it – or writing it on palimpsest vellum with a quill or however Jack White drafts his public apologies in a suitably period manner – with his face like a beetroot and his mouth pursed in a cat's bum of disapproval.
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White said he issued the apology in the hope it would stop his second solo album from "being hounded by nonsense", distracting from what is, after all, something of a radical musical departure for White. He spent 18 months working on Lazaretto (his most celebrated and successful album, the White Stripes' Elephant, took three days) and edited the results on computer, something previously verboten. It's tempting to say that while you can tell – Elephant sounded heavy, but Lazaretto sounds dense, to the point of occasionally seeming cluttered and a little messy – the things that are good about Lanzaretto are pretty much the same things that are good about every album White has made: great, crushing riffs, as found on the title track and High Ball Stepper; strategic deployment of his patented yowling, edge-of-panic vocal style; the presence of a distaff musical foil (in this case, backing singer Ruby Amanfu); the author's way with the kind of simple, timelessly pretty melody that decorates Entitlement and Want and Able; and his ability to impose himself on aged blues source material without losing its essence, demonstrated by the opening rewrite of Blind Willie McTell's 89-year-old Three Women Blues. But that's not entirely true. The title track may be the best thing here, and it's unlike anything White has attempted before: a deranged cocktail of screeching electronics, downhome fiddle and gloriously OTT guitar showboating with a deeply odd, episodic structure and an audible hip-hop influence in his vocal delivery. White said he issued the apology in the hope it would stop his second solo album from "being hounded by nonsense", distracting from what is, after all, something of a radical musical departure for White. He spent 18 months working on Lazaretto (his most celebrated and successful album, the White Stripes' Elephant, took three days) and edited the results on computer, something previously verboten. It's tempting to say that while you can tell – Elephant sounded heavy, but Lazaretto sounds dense, to the point of occasionally seeming cluttered and a little messy – the things that are good about Lazaretto are pretty much the same things that are good about every album White has made: great, crushing riffs, as found on the title track and High Ball Stepper; strategic deployment of his patented yowling, edge-of-panic vocal style; the presence of a distaff musical foil (in this case, backing singer Ruby Amanfu); the author's way with the kind of simple, timelessly pretty melody that decorates Entitlement and Want and Able; and his ability to impose himself on aged blues source material without losing its essence, demonstrated by the opening rewrite of Blind Willie McTell's 89-year-old Three Women Blues. But that's not entirely true. The title track may be the best thing here, and it's unlike anything White has attempted before: a deranged cocktail of screeching electronics, downhome fiddle and gloriously OTT guitar showboating with a deeply odd, episodic structure and an audible hip-hop influence in his vocal delivery.
But if you cleave to the theory that White's apology sounds not penitent, but livid, then it's easy to view it and his new album as being of a piece: there really doesn't seem to be that much difference between the man snapping "don't you want to lose the part of the brain that has opinions?" on That Black Bat Licorice and the one huffing on his website that he "should've been smarter to know" not to share his views about Duffy or Lana del Rey. On the surface, Lazaretto seems to be the work of someone who's furiously angry at everything from "children today" ("they take like Caesar and nobody cares," bemoans Entitlement) to God, who gets it in the neck on Temporary Ground: "He left us all here hanging with an illusion of a home."But if you cleave to the theory that White's apology sounds not penitent, but livid, then it's easy to view it and his new album as being of a piece: there really doesn't seem to be that much difference between the man snapping "don't you want to lose the part of the brain that has opinions?" on That Black Bat Licorice and the one huffing on his website that he "should've been smarter to know" not to share his views about Duffy or Lana del Rey. On the surface, Lazaretto seems to be the work of someone who's furiously angry at everything from "children today" ("they take like Caesar and nobody cares," bemoans Entitlement) to God, who gets it in the neck on Temporary Ground: "He left us all here hanging with an illusion of a home."
Anyone looking for the source of all this rage might note that just as the chain of events that eventually resulted in his apology began with some intemperate remarks White made in a mid-divorce email to his estranged wife, Karen Elson, so Lanzaretto sounds remarkably like a set of songs written by a man in the midst of a rancorous divorce, despite White's insistence that the character in the songs isn't him: frankly if you spend the first 13 years of your career insisting that your ex-wife is your sister, you are rather inviting a degree of scepticism about what you say. There are tut-tutting predictions of terrible regret on the part of the lady "walking out my back door" (Would You Fight for My Love?), small-hours admissions of terrible loneliness (Alone in My Home), defiant protestations of his immense sexual prowess (Three Women) and a lot of look-what-you've-done-to-me stuff about loss of trust: on I Think I Found the Culprit he can't even look out of his window at some birds without imagining that "one of them is up to no good". Anyone looking for the source of all this rage might note that just as the chain of events that eventually resulted in his apology began with some intemperate remarks White made in a mid-divorce email to his estranged wife, Karen Elson, so Lazaretto sounds remarkably like a set of songs written by a man in the midst of a rancorous divorce, despite White's insistence that the character in the songs isn't him: frankly if you spend the first 13 years of your career insisting that your ex-wife is your sister, you are rather inviting a degree of scepticism about what you say. There are tut-tutting predictions of terrible regret on the part of the lady "walking out my back door" (Would You Fight for My Love?), small-hours admissions of terrible loneliness (Alone in My Home), defiant protestations of his immense sexual prowess (Three Women) and a lot of look-what-you've-done-to-me stuff about loss of trust: on I Think I Found the Culprit he can't even look out of his window at some birds without imagining that "one of them is up to no good".
In the past, White has let bitterness overwhelm him to fairly unedifying effect: the White Stripes' least enjoyable album by some distance was 2005's Get Behind Me Satan, a dour howl of haughty outrage at virtually everyone who wasn't Jack White. What saves Lazaretto from a similar fate is that it possesses both a sense of humour – White introduces That Black Bat Licorice's fiddle solo with the wry announcement that it's merely a continuation of his grumpy fulminations, "the same damn thing with a violin" – and a sense of perspective. Entitlement shifts from peevishness to what sounds like self-admonishment: "Not one single person on God's golden shore is entitled to one single thing," he sings. "Who is the who that is telling who just what to do?" asks the concluding Want and Able, sweetly undermining the how-dare-you finger-wagging that's preceded it. And that's another way in which Lazaretto mirrors White's public apology: it's a rather more complicated business that it first appears.In the past, White has let bitterness overwhelm him to fairly unedifying effect: the White Stripes' least enjoyable album by some distance was 2005's Get Behind Me Satan, a dour howl of haughty outrage at virtually everyone who wasn't Jack White. What saves Lazaretto from a similar fate is that it possesses both a sense of humour – White introduces That Black Bat Licorice's fiddle solo with the wry announcement that it's merely a continuation of his grumpy fulminations, "the same damn thing with a violin" – and a sense of perspective. Entitlement shifts from peevishness to what sounds like self-admonishment: "Not one single person on God's golden shore is entitled to one single thing," he sings. "Who is the who that is telling who just what to do?" asks the concluding Want and Able, sweetly undermining the how-dare-you finger-wagging that's preceded it. And that's another way in which Lazaretto mirrors White's public apology: it's a rather more complicated business that it first appears.