Jack White’s renaissance continues on Frozen Charlotte

For a minute there, it felt like Jack White had lost the sauce. His solo debut, 2012’s Blunderbuss, and its follow-up, 2014’s Lazaretto, were built on dependable singer-songwriter fare, but 2018’s experimental yet aimless Boarding House Reach saw the former White Stripe hit an unexpected nadir, and his dual 2022 releases, the carnivalesque Fear of the Dawn and lackluster Entering Heaven Alive, were hardly an improvement. But when White released 2024’s No Name, an excellent return to form that catered to his garage-rock forte, it demonstrated that he hadn’t permanently foregone his greatest assets as a musician. He remembered what he was good at: writing concise, immediate rock songs whose simplicity belied their hypnotic effect. He was back.

The Detroit-bred, Nashville-based rock guru has successfully figured out how to filter his modern songwriting sensibilities through the infectiousness of his White Stripes work. It’s like if Icky Thump were dressed up in an extra dense coat of muck, or if White had already undergone his mad-scientist pedal fixation on Elephant, or if he’d learned to construct dizzying, serpentine sonic architecture before making White Blood Cells. On his latest record, Frozen Charlotte, he maintains his steady footing with another batch of blues-punk barn-burners, whose crunchy guitars and boisterous drums invariably rise to the rafters. 

The epic, multi-part guitar solo on closing track “Neighbors Blues” is proof enough that White knows how to shred. His switch from one mind-melting tone to another recalls the best parts of “Ball and Biscuit,” as do the various solos-in-miniature on opener “G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs,” in which White adopts the sprechgesang he’s favored of late to announce his intermittent shred sessions. “A little place to do the things we need to do” sounds like a fiery guitar solo, and “fruit from the tree of fate” tastes like yet another fiery guitar solo. By the third verse, White runs out of similes and instead commands you to “listen to me roll with it,” and roll with it he does. “Thick as Thieves” is a jolt of kinetic energy with its nimble fretwork and sixteenth-note pulse, ripe with the syncopated dexterity that puts the performers’ musicianship on full display. “She’s in a Frenzy” likewise bumps up the tempo with some thunderous low-end and off-beat guitar chords that evoke “Blue Orchid,” now resuscitated in a rustic garage.

Those piercing six-string shrieks from “Conquest” and “Little Cream Soda” find new life on “You’ll Never Fix Me” and “Dollar Bill,” the latter of which fits tidily within the album-wide critique of avarice, oligarchy, and political narcissism. It’s topical for someone who’s become a target of recent right-wing vitriol for his well-documented disdain of the Trump administration(s): “You can’t control me unless you owe me,” White snarls, “and you don’t own me unless I owe you.” On “All Alone Again,” he further investigates human greed in between some more white-hot shredding: “To find a needle in a haystack / well, it’s plenty easy / You just burn down the haystack,” he sings, his voice teeming with sardonicism. “Nobody Knows” takes aim at the inferiority complex of an undisclosed subject, who “can’t act like they don’t know” even though no one really has the answers to every question that plagues our mortal existence. The fact that it’s set against a backdrop of bluesy guitar heroics and rumbling toms makes it that much more seething. 

Jack White’s current renaissance—a shrewd alloy of great albums and relatively intimate, theater-sized shows—is an electric phenomenon to witness. In April last year, I caught his show at Kansas City’s Uptown Theater. Standing in the balcony, you could look down and see the throngs of people eager to see one of rock’s greatest living songwriters tear up a venue he sold out in mere minutes. Toward the end of a set littered with hits and deep cuts alike, White and his band treated the crowd to a live debut of “Derecho Demonico,” a blues-punk stomper that immediately resonated with everyone in attendance. 

White fed off the audience’s contagious rapture, cracking smiles in between vocal commands and solos that showed he was having as much fun as anyone else in that 2,400-capacity room. When I listen to Frozen Charlotte, that sense of fun is palpable. The seventh son has once again let loose for another collection of back-to-basics bangers that hit like a sledgehammer to the head. “I got one rule,” he sings toward the end of “Derecho Demonico,” “I don’t start nothing, nothing that I cannot finish.” He’s already started his bona fide comeback. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like he’s finished just yet. [Third Man Records]

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, critic, and musician. His work has also appeared in Interview Magazine, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.

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