Jack White starts strong with the first of two studio albums coming up this year.
In as much as one can be expected to muster up sympathy for a multi-million-selling, Grammy-award winning, household name rock star, it must be frustrating to be Jack White sometimes.
An artist in the truest sense, no matter which muses he follows he is and will always be best known for his guitar proficiency. The response to 2018’s Boarding House Reach (his last solo album) – which was garnished with synths and jazzy refrains – was tepid at best.
His belated response? Two albums released in the space of three months. While the second, Entering Heaven Alive, is promised to showcase his acoustic side, on Fear Of The Dawn he lets rip in his own unique way.
The main takeaway from his fourth solo record is that he’s having fun again which, for a man who is always portrayed as cantankerous, is unique enough.
That said, the first three tracks seem designed to reassure fans that he hasn’t misplaced his mojo; Taking Me Back features that familiar, fuzzy blister of guitar than can only be Jack White, a big rip riffer with incandescent singing (not to mention some impressive drumming, White’s own) which both sit alongside his better singles and successfully announces his return.
The theremin-flecked title-track gallops along next as it splinters all within earshot, and the theme of the album makes its first appearance: ‘In the dark, I can bet you and I won’t regret that it saved us.’
Possibly a riposte to some of the more outrageous rumours about White, such as that he only records by candlelight or that he’s literally a vampire, the theme of midnight and darkness is unsubtly (but then subtlety isn’t the order of the day this time) stamped throughout. The final piece of the opening ‘I’m back’ trilogy, mauling rocks songs all, The White Raven features White’s perpetually electrocuted vocals.
With any reservations put to bed, White is freed up to go haywire, and the album truly begins. He and A Tribe Called Quest legend Q-Tip have long been friends, but Hi De Ho is their first collaboration and the sort of freeform madness that, when White hits it perfectly, soars.
The dubby Eosophobia (literally morbid fear of daylight – ‘I don’t fear you, I fear the dawn’) follows and throws everything at the wall, be it Afrobeat or Edge-esque waves of guitar.
Structurally obscure, there is a simple verse and chorus in the mid-section, but it passes through like a train through a tunnel. Its reprise later in the album is the sort of elongation of a song that one might expect to be performed live, meandering but just the right side of indulgent.
White has never been the most patient of artists, freely admitting that he would frequently discard ideas with little remorse, but for this project he changed his approach, pursuing ideas obsessively.
Into The Twilight, the album’s centre-piece, is by his own admission the song White has laboured over most in his entire career, and it shows. With samples from jazz institution Manhattan Transfer and using William S Burrough’s famous ‘cut-up’ technique, it’s a wonky, trippy number which lasts five minutes but crams in enough to fill a whole album.
The tricks and flourishes continue on That Was Then (This Is Now) (‘Do you know where it goes when you’re walking round that midnight?’) as White crams the offbeat with additional percussion while delivering a grin-inducing, buzz-cutting riff on What’s The Trick.
So freed and inspired is he that, for the first time ever, he allows someone else to deliver a guitar solo, with Duane Denison from The Jesus Lizard duly supplying the goods on Morning, Noon And Night. Lastly, album closer Shedding My Velvet owes a debt to of all people Portishead in its tinny drums and woozy feel. A closing motif of, ‘It’s better to illuminate than merely to shine’, finally explains the principle of this collection of futurist rock manifestos.
It goes without saying that White’s own guitar playing is outrageously good and unrestrained. The pulsating sonics of Fear Of The Dawn ensure its position as Jack White’s most focused and immediate album to date.
While we are promised a musical volte-face for the next album, it leaves the listener satisfyingly tantalised.
