Review Summary: Jack White is a mad scientist, creating Frankenstein-like songs with a plethora of stitched-together elements that come together with pounding vitality.
Jack White (born Jack Gillis) is a Detroit-native rock musician and multi-instrumentalist who was formerly one half of The White Stripes (prior to his divorce with Meg White). It's been almost exactly a decade since he launched his first solo effort,
Blunderbuss, which saw White continuing in largely the same vein as his prior work with Meg, exploring garage and indie rock from a variety of angles but in ways that would still be familiar to his fan base. 2014's
Lazaretto largely stayed the course, with a few more country-style songs thrown into the mix. However, in 2018, Jack White shocked his fan base and the musical community with
Boarding House Reach, a decidedly uncommercial and chaotic album that saw him experimenting with electronic music, art rock, spoken word, and other avant-garde musical elements. While the move alienated some fans of his more straightforward rock, many in the musical community praised the shift and felt that White was finally starting to let his full musical genius shine through.
Enter
Fear Of The Dawn, the first of two releases planned for this year (with the latter,
Entering Heaven Alive, set for release in late July). In the lead-up to this record, fans wondered if we would see White continue in the same experimental vein, or if we would see a return to form to a more straightforward indie rock sound. The answer is decidedly the former, but with an asterisk: this album also manages to be
heavy in addition to being experimental. The album is replete with unexpected instrument tones, electronic samples, and eclectic song structures, but instead of coming across as an abstract artist, White takes on the role of mad scientist who stitches together these elements to create Frankenstein-like songs with a pounding, head-banging energy and vitality.
This is apparent from the album's opener,
"Taking Me Back," which starts off with an authoritative, ground-shaking guitar riff so laden with distortion that it's almost static-like in its fuzziness. This forms a musical core that is largely constant throughout the song, sprinkled with a variety of engaging sound effects and short instrumental runs that sustain the heavy energy across the four-minute runtime. With this song, Jack White is making a statement: he's here to break all the rules and have a lot of fun in the process. Due to COVID restrictions, White ended up playing and recording nearly every instrument on his own, so there was no one else to check him and hold him back. This is true even in the imperceptible details; for example, in an interview White revealed that he recorded the drums last in every song, just because that's something you're not supposed to do.
"Taking Me Back" leads straight into the more urgent and driving guitar riff in
"Fear Of The Dawn," with emphatic guitar shrieks in the background that sound like the monsters from an old Godzilla movie. White's vocals are a highlight of this two-minute cut, adding to the intensity of this track with a nearly shouted delivery that manages to stay melodic. The following track,
"The White Raven," starts with a few seconds of silence with a slow, meandering bass riff before launching into pummeling guitar line that somehow features even more distortion than the previous songs. Throughout these first three tracks, it's sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the guitar and the synth as the distortion and effects White uses effectively blurs the lines between the two.
From here, the album starts to get
weird, but not in a bad way.
"Hi-De-Ho" is a totally chaotic track that is all over the place musically but still finds a way to be catchy and interesting. A funeral procession-like distorted bass line leads into a theatrical Cab Calloway vocal sample, before moving into a rapped verse from Q-Tip with a flow and muted guitar line that sounds a bit like early Eminem (e.g., "The Real Slim Shady"). And the song's not even halfway over at this point; from there, the track moves into a slower, Spanish sounding acoustic guitar segment before reintroducing the palm-muted bass line against rolling tom drums and chaotic vocal samples from White.
"Eosophobia" (which literally means a fear of dawn or daylight) is another of the quirkier tracks on this record that sounds a bit more like 1970s progressive rock, while continuing the sonic experimentation as instrumental layers come in and out like a diverse cast of characters acting out varying interpretations on a theme. This stretch of weirdness is capped off with
"Into the Twilight," a very electronic-sounding song with glitchy drums and a variety of distorted vocal samples and effects. While none of these tracks were among my favorites, I think they most clearly demonstrate White's strength as a songwriter; despite all the oddity being presented, I never felt alienated or disengaged. These are all tracks I would enjoy coming back to again.
The interlude
"Dusk" leads into one of my favorite songs on the album,
"What's the Trick?", that sees White sounding like a madman with an unhinged vocal delivery that falls somewhere in between spoken word and vehement shouting throughout the song. Despite this, it's still one of the most musical tracks since "The White Raven," featuring some more reigned-in sonic experimentation over another catchy and high-energy guitar riff. This leads into
"That Was Then, This Is Now," which gives the vibe of 1960s rock-n-roll soaked in modern heaviness and features the most melodic and sing-alongable chorus to this point on the record.
"Eosophobia (Reprise)" gives a more minimalist interpretation of the original, with a drum set that sounds like it was purchased from a thrift store carrying most of the weight as guitar and synth lines come in and out, calling back to the original refrains. This leads into the last leg of the album, which in my opinion features its two weakest tracks.
"Morning, Noon, and Night" is the most straightforward and melodic song on the record, with White singing about how he wishes he could find more time to spend with his now-wife Olivia Jean (who he proposed to and then married onstage at a concert in Detroit earlier this month). While I still enjoyed this track, it's relatively unremarkable compared to the rest of the record. The album's finale,
"Shedding My Velvet," is the only time the energy really comes down in a sustained way, featuring darker and bluesier instrumentation throughout. While it was the least appealing track for me musically, I did appreciate the song's final refrain: "Better to illuminate than merely to shine."
In terms of lyrical content, I felt like telling a cohesive story took a backseat to musical creativity and experimentation. The last two tracks (and perhaps "Hi-De-Ho") were really the only points on the album where I was able to piece together a coherent theme, but I don't see this as a big issue. I suspect storytelling was never Jack White's goal here. As he said in a recent Zane Lowe interview, White finally feels like he has the technical production skills to create the sounds he's always wanted to, and you can tell that's exactly what he's doing throughout this album. The result is a disorderly, strange, and potent combination of creative decisions that all somehow work. This album is a worthy follow-up to
Boarding House Reach, and should make fans very excited about the new, unrestrained version of Jack White that has "shed his velvet."
