Jack White - Frozen Charlotte
Frozen Charlotte is Jack White’s seventh studio album. If you include White’s output as a member of acts like The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and The Dead Weather, it’s his nineteenth. White is a true songwriter, an audacious troubadour who has cut his teeth on a unique style of garage-blues rock. His projects range from intimate fuzzy rock songs that could have been cut inside of a phone booth on the side of a country road to seven-note calls-to-action that will rally the nearest stadium crowd into a frenzy (go to any sporting event today and try to escape hearing a crowd sing the opening notes to “Seven Nation Army”. I dare you). Frozen Charlotte doesn’t reinvent the wheel or greatly expand upon the work that White has brought forth on previous records, but it’s damn good, picking up right where 2024’s No Name left off.
Biblical references abound on Frozen Charlotte. White opens the album in the Garden of Eden (“G.O.D.” And The Broken Ribs”) before singing later over a technical blues riff on “There’s Nobody There” (“holy water dripping over the roses/It stood me up as I was starting to kneel”). He confronts the existence of God and our place in the universe on “Nobody Knows (“Nobody knows/Why one species dies and one keeps goin?/Nobody knows/From Neanderthals to the Denisovans”). He verges into near nonsense with Seussian rhymes on “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” (“Click, clack, back track, tick tock, smack talk), which calls to mind verses on Icky Thump’s “Rag and Bone”. Lyrically, he is all over the place, letting the music take him wherever it damn well pleases. His trademark preacher-like diatribes echo throughout the album, making him a cross between a rock star and a televangelist. Except, in the case of the televangelist, we’re actually buying what he’s selling.
The back half of Frozen Charlotte finds White becoming mercurial, jumping between committing himself to a loving partnership (“Thick As Thieves”), to wondering if there is actually any comfort in the relationships that make up our lives (“All Alone Again”), to eventually burning out (“Making Contact”, with lines like “If you set me out to pasture/Take me out and blow my mind/And you will make a secret garden/And flowers, they’ll bloom in good time”)
A distorted, hammer-on guitar riff signals album closer “Neighbors Blues”, which finds White singing about bad relationships with the neighbors around him (“Neighbors/Never have anything to say/Always got some kind of opinion brewing/Always playing games I don’t wanna play”). It almost feels like White wants to isolate and be alone. He says he doesn’t want to see neighbors in his backyard in the album’s final song. It feels like a metaphor, but I’m not entirely sure. Sometimes, White writes vaguely enough that the meaning of the songs isn’t so explicit, and you have to decipher it yourself.
Again, there isn’t anything truly new or revolutionary that White hasn’t done already on previous records, but he has a signature style and plays with conviction on every song he touches. There’s not much more you can ask for.
