Jack White - Lazaretto (2014) [FLAC] [log] [cue]

Whenever he talks about the White Stripes, Jack White always stresses Meg White’s importance to the band—and how could he not? She was the only other person up on stage. In the current issue of Rolling Stone, he says, “I would often look at her onstage and say, ‘I can’t believe she’s up here.’ I don’t think she understood how important she was to the band, and to me and to music. She was the antithesis of a modern drummer. So childlike and incredible and inspiring.” That quote is a bit uncomfortable in its patronizing and primitivizing attitude toward Meg, but the White Stripes emphasized the “childlike” in nearly every aspect of the band, from their red-and-white wardrobe to their imaginative videos, to songs like “We’re Going to be Friends”.

Her chops might have been rudimentary, but Meg kept Jack’s guitar virtuosity in check and kept their music from being merely a display of technique. He soloed frequently but never pointlessly, and indulged none of the ostentatious jamming that defines blues rock: no white-boy blues face, no standing at the lip of the stage, no look-how-deeply-I-am-feeling-these-notes bullshit. That playful sound is what made the White Stripes so revolutionary in the 2000s. The blues has always prized instrumental prowess, but blues rock typically equates that trait with authenticity of emotion. After so many generations of Eric Claptons and Jonny Langs, it was refreshing at the turn of the century to hear someone have fun with the form again. Like first-gen punks, the White Stripes proved you didn’t have to be good to be great, that your limitations could enable rather than hinder expression. Theirs was a little room, as Jack sang on White Blood Cells, but they still found many corners.

Since the White Stripes split, however, Jack moved into a bigger room, surrounded by musicians who are capable in the traditional sense of the word. His work has become fuller, of course, more elaborate and more conventionally ambitious; his idiosyncrasies have dimmed a bit, too, so his music is less subversive, less culture-shaking, less special. Despite their pedigree, the Raconteurs never really figured out their mission (although hiring country singer Ashley Monroe might be mission enough). The Dead Weather can be admirably heavy and darkly savage, but also dour and claustrophobic, as though the riffs are closing in on you. White’s debut album, 2012’s Blunderbuss, reportedly inspired by his divorce from Karen Elson, sounded uncharacteristically bilious, especially from the man who wrote “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”. In fact, nowadays White might be most compelling as a label impresario who releases new singles via balloons and coaxes Neil Young to record a covers album in a modified phone booth. It’s the one role where he displays the same sense of childlike whimsy that motivated the White Stripes.

Lazaretto makes all of his other projects sound a bit scrawny by comparison. It’s the densest, fullest, craziest, and most indulgent that White has sounded with or without Meg—almost pointedly so, as though he’s trying to shake the minimalism that defined the White Stripes. It’s an almost self-consciously busy-minded album, chockablock with ideas and sounds, all colliding violently and sometimes brutally. There’s a lot of pedal steel, a lot more barrelhouse piano, some folksy strumming, some rock-rapping, and the persistent buzz of White’s guitar. The most decorous and over-the-top song on Lazaretto (and arguably the standout) “Would You Fight for My Love?” plays like an exquisite corpse: It opens with a low, Lynchian hum, the kind you hear in your bowels, then morphs into something like a rock ballad, with Ikey Owens pounding out power chords on the piano. With its flatulent bass, the bridge sounds like Goblin scoring a murder scene, complete with spooky disembodied vocals. The song ends up in a Celtic honkytonk, somehow.

The instrumental “High Ball Stepper” is loaded with Bernard Hermann anxieties, while “Temporary Ground” elaborates gently on rural folk music, opening with a violin dancing gingerly around Maggie Björklund’s pedal steel (the song was reportedly inspired by gigantic lily pads that can support a man’s weight). “Just One Drink” plays like a Coca-Cola jingle; “Entitlement” is stately C&W. Not everything fits together fluidly, but that might just be the point: These disparate sounds are not just accessories to be applied to blues rock, but rich veins of tradition that compete for primacy on Lazaretto. White invites us to see the craft here, to notice the seams, to consider the contrasts—not necessarily out of any self-congratulatory impulse, but out of awe for the endless permutations of American popular music.

White comes across like a man out of time on Lazaretto, a role that proves more sympathetic and relatable than the embittered lover he played on Blunderbuss; he seems to be having a lot more fun yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. “There are children today who were lied to, told the world is rightfully theirs,” he sings on “Entitlement”, a countercultural anthem that political midpoint between “Signs” and “Okie from Muskogee”. “Don’t they feel like they're cheated somehow? I feel like I've been cheated somehow.” His is not necessarily a generational complaint, though; instead, he just can’t understand why something given could ever be as precious as something earned.

In its volleys of nimble-fingered riffs and its willy-nilly combination of styles, Lazaretto is all about virtuosity, with White reverting back to the idea of blues rock as a form of emotional confession: a space where you can project feelings and re-enact age-old dramas. Yet, White sneaks in a few jokes at the idea. Witness this scene from “The Black Bat Licorice”: “She writes letters like a Jack Chick comic, just a bunch of propaganda/ She makes my fingers histrionic, like this [paint-peeling guitar riff] and this [paint-peeling guitar riff]!” It’s a funny little moment in a song that otherwise sounds leery of desire, wary of love, simultaneously burdened and freed by sex. Somehow, even with White rapping his lyrics like leprous carnival barker, it’s a great, nervy track, both sugary and sour. Still, the song provides another reminder of White's past glory days, as it might sound better stripped down to guitar and drums.