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Jack White‘s new album Frozen Charlotte opens with a kind of joke.
“Welcome to the Garden of Eden,” he sings on “G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs.” “There’s nobody here but me and you/ So what we gonna be eating?” Most listeners will be waiting for the apple to load, but White answers his own question immediately with a rhyme: “Microphone check, one-two, one-two.”
In this telling it is music that is the great Tempter, the end of paradise and the beginning of history. From this moment forward on Frozen Charlotte the guitar will take centerstage, with White and his vocal melodies, if not reduced to backup singer, then at least diminished in importance.
White continues the bit: “Looks like we got a little place to do the things we need to do now, and it’ll sound like this.” Cue what is less a solo than a wordless monologue of a universe being built. The next guitar monologue comes from Eve finding out she is not meant to be Adam’s sister, after White howls, “They’re gonna make you a mother.” This is met with the blues guitar equivalent of Kevin Hart screaming “WHAT?” followed by an at-times painful resolution. Motherhood is not for the weak.
So it goes. On “Derecho Demonico” White says, “You’ll have to try to twist my arm,” and then the guitar starts to howl. For “There’s Nobody There” it’s the instrument that follows through on White’s promise to throw up flares and smoke. The violent struggle of anti-capitalist “Dollar Bill” is fought with axe in hand.
The aesthetic won’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with White’s discography, but the emphasis is a little different. Gone are dense political diatribes like “Icky Thump” or “Archbishop Harold Holmes” — “Dollar Bill” is almost a nursery rhyme with just 32 unique words. Instead, White is more prone to echo a phrase than in any period except perhaps the earliest of The White Stripes. The Frozen Charlotte tracks “There’s Nobody There” and “Thick as Thieves” are more than half repetitions. Despite some varied verses, the clear takeaway from “She’s in a Frenzy” is the refrain, “She’s in a frenzy/ A frenzy/ She’s in a frenzy/ A frenzy!” Aside from the deliciously wordy opener, few of these cuts have the lyrical density to fill another poetry book.
That’s all right, White’s guitar can do the talking, and on Frozen Charlotte it keeps showing off a sly sense of humor. “You’ll Never Fix Me” has hair metal flourishes that a) rip and b) tell us not to feel too bad for the protagonist. There’s none of the pain of childbirth that Eve felt earlier on “G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs,” and instead a descending four-then-five note riff hits like, oh I don’t know, wind from a fast car whipping through a thick plume of chest hair, or a Tarantino murder scene built around brutal slapstick. There’s a hint of irony, sure, but more than that, White sounds dead set on having fun.
This comes through in songs that seem written for the live show. The muscular breakdown in “Raising the Grain,” complete with a repeated refrain of “Hey! Hey!”, will hit hard as hell at a club near you. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” makes good on its title with several distinct movements, connected by little more than the BPM and a two-note groove as irresistible and goofy as Will Ferrell on cowbell. Is it ha-ha funny? Not at all, but wryness comes through nonetheless. The same way that “Seven Nation Army” lends itself to a unified march, Frozen Charlotte is made for a shit-eating grin.
White is no longer the young rocker obsessed with myth — who once pulled a reverse Adam and Eve, and turned a wife into a kind of sister. It takes real effort to maintain mystery; dropping it might be a relief. These days he knows he doesn’t need the origin stories or color-coordinated outfits to hold our attention; he’s in Saturday Night Live‘s five-timer club, for crying out loud. He sounds unruffled; in his lane; chilling.
Frozen Charlotte is named for a rigid porcelain doll, itself christened after a girl in a folk song who refused to wear a coat over her pretty gown and froze to death on her way to the ball. White drops the name in “G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs” in his role as an antiquarian, comparing himself to something old and cheap that relied on imagination. But it proves to be a fitting metaphor for the kind of album White set out to make.
A Frozen Charlotte doll cost as little as one penny, and while she couldn’t do the splits like Barbie, similar models brought joy to poorer homes across Victorian England and early America. Something cheap that unlocks the imagination has always been White’s idea of a good time, as well as his conception of the guitar itself.
Like a doll, a guitar is a collection of lifeless parts that, in the right hands, can become a whole world. More than most of the albums in his Rock Hall career, White’s Frozen Charlotte is a love letter to his favorite instrument, play time with a friend. And despite — or perhaps because of — this shift in emphasis away from lyrics and towards guitar, it has never been easier to see the real man inside the icon.
Frozen Charlotte Artwork:
Frozen Charlotte Tracklist:
01. G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs
02. Derecho Demonico
03. There’s Nobody There
04. Raising the Grain
05. You’ll Never Fix Me
06. Nobody Knows
07. Dollar Bill
08. I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing
09. Thick as Thieves
10. All Alone Again
11. She’s in a Frenzy
12. Making Contact
13. Neighbors Blues
English (US) · 