“I got one rule/I don’t start nothing/Nothing I can’t finish,” Jack White announces early in this album’s non-stop cannonade of martial-blues stomp and guitar-army theater, summing up his moral code in the chopped stride and soprano-distortion seizures
of “Derecho Demonico.” And there’s more. “What I do/And how I do/And why I do it/It’s all none of your business,” he warns, firing each line like he’s spitting bullets. Still don’t get his drift? The song’s title is Spanish for “demonic law.” Cross this cat at your peril.
Frozen Charlotte is White’s eighth solo album, fourth in as many years and his most sustained maximalist-garage studio party in the eternity since the White Stripes’ breakthrough rager, 2003’s Elephant. There was more room to catch your breath in the swagger and density of Led Zeppelin II than you get in White’s serial rush out of that devilry in “Derecho Demonico” into the rock-slide riffing and Hammond organ afire of “There’s Nobody There”; “Raising the Grain”‘s hard rain of tribal drumming and shouted incantation; and the ’68-Motor City helter-skelter of “You’ll Never Fix Me.” In that last blast, White and his current killers on the road – bassist Dominic Davis (one of the leader’s original Buzzards), drummer Patrick Keeler (the Greenhornes, the Raconteurs) and B-3 wrangler Bobby Emmett (formerly in Detroit ravers the Sights) – get down like they’re on a Saturday-night bill at the Grande Ballroom with SRC and the MC5 with an extra touch of then in Emmett’s closing, ghostly trail of mellotron.
This record – named after White’s sculpture on the cover, an image of broken innocence and looming menace in turn descended from a traditional folk song about a young girl’s fatal vanity – is very much a rage for these times, 13 songs of perpetual disorder, challenged connections and idealism under siege. White has no fear of the specific online, naming names and calling out brazen hypocrisies in his posts. But his force of argument here is at once more coded and universal, a manic blowback of slippery wordplay, in-jokes and pocket-grenade axioms equal to the music’s loud and twisted kicks. “Hey, I’m confused and I bet it shows,” White confesses in “Nobody Knows,” throwing in a reference to the Denisovans (an Asian subspecies of Neanderthals – I had to look it up) and citing Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Pythagoras like a police lineup from a ’65 Bob Dylan song. Later, in the marbled-guitar din of “All Alone Again,” White prescribes extreme measure like he’s chatting with you over the garden fence: “To find a needle in a haystack/Well it’s plenty easy/You just burn down the haystack/And then you’ll find what you need.”
Bob Dylan was right: Everything is broken. So was Iggy Pop in 1973: “Raw power is sure to come a-runnin’ to you.” In “G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs,” White opens the album with his version of that empowering contradiction, soundchecking in a Garden of Eden at the end of days (“Microphone check one two one two”) with a mounting confidence of curt, grunting chords, furious instrumental fills and the stacked agitation of his one-man dirty-angel harmonies: “Looks like we got a/Little place to do the/things we need to do now.”
Nothing, of course, comes easy. There are plenty of man-woman trials amid the topical static – the “kitchen cemetery of poses” in “There’s Nobody There”; the pleading ruckus of “Thick as Thieves.” And the closing, paranoid creep of “Neighbor Blues” – a slow-burn jam like Elephant‘s “Ball and Biscuit” armored up for the surveillance age – ends with White calling in his own voodoo (“On your grave, three roosters standing guard”).
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either – and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
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