Jack White Keeps Rock on the Front Burner in ‘Frozen Charlotte’: Review
The first question most Jack White fans are looking to have answered to when it comes to his new album, “Frozen Charlotte”: Is it effectively a “No Name 2.0”? Nearly everyone is hoping for a “yes,” on that one. In his solo career, White spent a few years notably bouncing around, veering between acoustically oriented efforts and pure freakazoid workouts, to wildly mixed reactions. Then came 2024’s “No Name,” one of the great modern rock ‘n’ roll records, which satisfied approximately 99.2% of the fan base with a formula that amounted to something like “the White Stripes, but beefier and brawnier.” Rarely has a standom been more primed to say, Please, sir, may we have another.
So, to cut to the chase: Yes! “Frozen Charlotte” feels like a sequel… a sequel people actually asked for. It couldn’t play much more like one if White had set to work on this one the day after sessions for “No Name” ended, even if we know that’s not exactly how or when it went down. Glory, hallelujah: You may now kiss the spinoff.
The sense of musical continuity is a welcome thing for fans who wanted to hear White keep mining that same vein of intricate/blowhard blues-rock. But listen beneath the surface of all that mind-blowing busywork and some differences do become apparent — more so in his attitude than the arrangements. Plainly put, Jack White is pissed. As in, really pissed, about something. Admittedly, sometimes it can be hard to tell: Even at his most mirthful or joyous, he has a way of sounding like he’s in a state of agitation. So, sure, his music already sounded furious, in fundamentally playful records like “No Name” and “Boarding House Reach.” But with “Frozen Charlotte,” it’s as if his psyche caught up. Whatever brought it on, it’s not bad for the music, which is as compelling as it is pummeling. He’s angry, and if anything, that’s just going to make us more mad about the boy.
What’s he got to be upset about? Well, some of the same things that have stirred the fury of rockers since the dawn of time — namely: a girl who has done him wrong, an inscrutable God, and the prying eyes of nosy outsiders. White alternates vexing existential questions about the very nature of existence (starting with the first single, “G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs”) with smaller-picture complaints about a relationship that has gone very, very awry (“You’ll Never Fix Me”). The settings range from the Garden of Eden to his own kitchen, which is invoked twice in this album as a place where unpleasant things happen. In other words, the Sturm und Drang is both cosmic and domestic. But wherever the sense of chaos is coming from, he is going to make it the stuff of moshpits, whether he is performing these songs out on the road or just inspiring you to bounce off of the walls of your own living space. (You are angry about something, too, aren’t you?)
As promised, his all comes out in the form of deliriously relentless rock ‘n’ roll, released in short, cathartic bursts. Among the 13 songs here, only one is longer than four minutes, and several hover around the two-and-a-half-minute mark. But White crams so much into every number, none of them feel nearly that compact. It’s like each one is as filling as a rich dessert… if a rich dessert were also capable of delivering powerful body blows.
If you know your rock history a little, you could imagine that White is basing his whole current aesthetic on Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker,” which is a pretty solid rock upon which to build one’s house. Just as Jimmy Page would have the rest of the band drop out so that he could have a few precious seconds to unload some pure, unleavened guitar squall, you find that replicated in the very first song here, the aforementioned “G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs.” Except White is a bit more democratic and economical about it — he takes the first two mini-solos between verses in this opening song, then allows bassist Dominic Davis, drummer Patrick Keeler and Hammond organist Bobby Emmett to each solo for a few seconds when their turns come up. It sets the stage for an m.o. that is fast and faster, and loud and louder, but with a savvy sense of dynamics and change-ups — crushingly “heavy” music that somehow manages to evince a light touch.
As good as it is, “G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs” might actually be the weakest cut on the album, so if that one didn’t completely grab you when it came out as a teaser track, make a date to go in for a deeper dive here. Things really start to take shape with the second number, “Derecho Demonico,” which starts off with White offering a kind of classic blues boast: “Well, I came to ya on the back of a twister storm / You know I got something up my sleeve, I guess you’ll have to twist my arm.” The suggested arm-twisting elicits an extended solo that has either White’s guitar or his vocals (or both) being put through some kind of squawk box. Later on, Emmett takes a Hammond organ solo marked by the kind of distortion that suggests Uriah Heep doing garage-rock. It’s kind of happily exhausting, and the album is still just getting started.
“There’s Nobody There” begins with an intricate, twisty riff, and then, at the 1:40 mark, assumes that you might have already gotten bored with that riff, so it’s time to introduce an entirely different one as a bridge. Why not? Keeler’s snare drum head couldn’t be more tightly wound, unless it were White’s mind. The singer repeats “Well, if you know me, you’ll never love me” six times. The onset of more organ soloing by Emmett over twin guitars is just the barrage needed to slam home the paranoia and loneliness in a song that alternates self-effacement with self-defensive allegations of gaslighting and abandonment.
Some songs slam right out of the gate, like “You’ll Never Fix Me,” which has White’s guitar pounding the listener with jackhammer quarter notes while Keeler offers contrastingly fluid drum fills. Not everything starts at an 11. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” begins with a nice, basic thump — not an icky one at all — before uncovering the album’s one “pretty” chorus, which is to say, something you could imagine on a Ranconteurs record. And so it goes: the songs relent long enough to give just a moment’s rest, and then get in your face again, like well-designed carnival rides that just happen to offer bonus emotional content.
Occasionally White gets in some social commentary, although less than you might guess from his Instagram. “Making Contact” morphs into the phrase “making content” and goes on to deliver the album’s wildest and silliest rhyme: “Like JP Morgan or Rockefeller / Tell the world they shouldn’t care bout salmonella.”Or maybe that honor should be reserved for “Nobody Knows,” a song themed around agnosticism, which includes this classic couplet: “Well, so is God making fun of us?… / You and me, Isaac, Albert, Pythagoras.” And this one: “From Neanderthals to the Denisovans… / Are the homosapiens the future aliens?” There is welcome comic relief of that sort in White being able joke around with his wordplay a little when he’s pondering the nature of the universe. Because when it comes to the other songs that deal with affairs closer to the heart, he seems as serious as a heart attack.
There is an elephant in the room here, if you believe that most popular music is confessional to some degree, and that is the divorce filing that White’s wife, Olivia Jean, made shortly before the new album came out. Maybe it’s irrelevant. White has avowed in interviews (including one in Variety a few years ago) that when he sits down to write lyrics, he is not interested in delving into his personal life. We could take him at his word on that, and also, at least some of the new record was recorded long enough ago that Jean is credited for playing bass on one number. But at the same time, the lyrics so consistently deal with strife and estrangement that you don’t get the impression “Frozen Charlotte” would necessarily be an album someone would write on his honeymoon.
“So long, so long, I’m gone,” White keeps repeating in “You’ll Never Fix Me.” “My love is broken, it’s inside of your mind / Just ’cause I don’t speak that don’t make me a mime / Chat your friends that you will never fix me / Just take a shot and you’ll miss me.” And: “So long, I’m yelling now because I’m gone / Son you can fix up the sheets in the morn / I’ve had enough of waking up in pain.” At his most cynical, in the slide guitar-driven “Dollar Bill,” he sings, “She did it for the love / And a dollar, a dollar bill.” His writing isn’t thick with mundane details, but when one pops up, it tends to draw your attention: “Can you believe the energy she wasted on the kitchen floor?” he asks in “She’s in a Frenzy,” proclaiming that he is oddly jealous of a woman he describes as “a tempest in a coffee cup.” Whatever is going on to stir all this up, it seems like some intense shit.
White would not be happy about these songs being used to speculate about what goes on behind closed doors — that seems evident enough from the several songs on the album that express enmity toward snoops and know-it-alls. In “Derecho Demonico,” he concludes, “What I do and how I do and why I do it, it’s none of your business.” And the whole final track — “Neighbours Blues,” the one that is actually relaxed enough to stretch to the five-minute mark — is literally a NIMBY anthem. “I know we need ’em,” he says of the concept of neighbors, “just not in my backyard… Yeah, my hedges are too high, aren’t they? They want to keep an eye on me, so they can get their licks.” He adds, in a clever transition, “I’m gonna get some of my own,” and proceeds to deliver some of the album’s best licks in a guitar solo that goes somewhere supersonic.
The solos here are just about all short and not at all sweet; White has a way of making his native instrument sound more like an angry theremin than a guitar, in a tune like “Dollar Bill.” The playfulness comes in sometimes in just where the solos are placed. In “Nobody Knows,” he sings about the impossibility of anyone ever getting an answer to life’s most imponderable existential questions. Then he blurts, “Well, maybe somebody knows,” suggesting that there could be a God who just does not want to let on to us, and he immediately follows that with a solo that maybe is meant to convey what it is like to come up against a withholding, mischievous deity. If agnosticism can be encapsulated in a guitar solo, White has pulled that off.
Having expounded on the album’s fascinating lyrics, it may bear mentioning that only a handful of White’s fans will devote any time at all to pondering them. When these new songs come up in his U.S. tour, fans will marvel at how well the clarion-call riffs fit in with the classic chord progressions that already fill ballparks, and admire his chutzpah and classic-rock brawn, not his poetic sensitivity. That’s as it should be. There are some deep thoughts buried in “Frozen Charlotte” about the solitariness of existence and how “we’ve been alone since the day that we came home” from the maternity ward. But when everyone is at the Brooklyn Paramount or Hollywood Palladium in the coming months, bobbing heads in unison to these barnburners, it will be a jubilee, a lonely experience. A little shared visceral agitation looks good on all of us.
The first question most Jack White fans
