Album Review: Jack White, Frozen Charlotte

Frozen Charlotte, the seventh Jack White solo album, is raggedly mischievous, totally wired and an absolute blast. From the off, opener ‘G.O.D And The Broken Rib’ – yep, it’s about Adam & Eve and the Garden of Eden – is thoroughly doused in the gold-plated garage rock, the type for which White has already received 16 Grammys.

This record really is stellar stuff. ‘Derecho Dominco’ – all buzzsaw guitar, stomp-box roguery, fuzzed-up squeals, frenetic Hammond and jazzy hi-hats – offers no choice but to dance with wild abandon. And there’s no let-up. ‘There’s Nobody There’ and ‘Raising the Grain’ prove White can crank this stuff out all day and then some, the latter delivered complete with melodic lines of sterling push-pull quality: sharp, bluesy guitar figures are answered by sweet, almost Beatle-esque vocal phrases, bouncing off White’s grit in a compelling call and response.

‘You’ll Never Fix Me’ and ‘Nobody Knows’ plunge deeper and keener into magnificent blues-rock bedlam, before the isolated guitar figure on ‘Dollar Bill’ draws a line in the sand, marking the half-way point of the dizzying sensory overload. ‘Thick As Thieves’ takes the baton and runs with it. And on ‘All Alone Again’ White declares that “to find a needle in a haystack, well it’s pretty easy, you just burn down the haystack and then you’ll find what you need.”

That might double as something of an artistic manifesto for Frozen Charlotte.

8/10