On third solo album Boarding House Reach, Jack White lays waste to our expectations about his music, but you might not like the results.
All things considered, Jack White is doing pretty well for himself. It’s been over a decade since his best-known project, the White Stripes, released their final album Icky Thump, but he’s managed to keep himself busy during the intervening years. He has three albums with side project the Dead Weather under his belt, in addition to two from an earlier act, the Raconteurs. His record label Third Man Records established their first physical location in 2009, and their second in 2015. He recently found himself on A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got It From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service and Beyoncé’s Lemonade. Last but not least, he released two acclaimed solo albums under his own name, and has now given us solo album three, Boarding House Reach.
As you can guess, White has used his solo albums to highlight the strengths that propelled the White Stripes to international fame – namely, his intricate guitar playing and ability to integrate blues and folk under the umbrella of garage rock. On Blunderbuss, this ranged from the raw, Stripes-esque riffs of “Sixteen Saltines” to the country sounds of the title track. Lazaretto showed White moving more toward a sound all his own, which mixed blues, psychedelia, and honky-tonk, bearing little resemblance to the Stripes’s simplicity. Now able to define what his own music sounds like without any obligations to a band, one would assume that Jack White’s third record picked up where Lazaretto left off.
Boarding House Reach is more like a wrecking ball, destroying all assumptions about what Jack White is supposed to sound like. It marks the first time ever that White has been involved in a project best described as “experimental.” And like a wrecking ball leveling a well-established building, you might not like the new development built afterwards.
If you listen to Boarding House Reach expecting anything like Blunderbuss and Lazaretto, you’ll be disappointed. You know Jack White primarily as a guitarist? The album’s first single and opening track “Connected By Love,” is electro-gospel that only introduces guitar halfway through.
If “Connected By Love,” raises your eyebrows, other parts of Boarding House Reach will bring them all the way to your scalp. The most prominent of these is “Ice Station Zebra,” better known as the “the track where Jack White raps.” Yes, Jack White rapping. He’s come close on the Dead Weather’s “Three Dollar Hat,” but he’s never spit bars like “yo, you paint like Caravaggio” before. The delivery verges on “how do you do, fellow kids?” territory at times, with lyrics about how we should avoid labels because no one is truly original, yet it’s hardly the most odious thing on the album.
From start to finish, there’s a pervasive sense that much of Boarding House Reach is experimentation for its own sake. White isn’t being different just to try new musical styles, he’s trying to challenge you and get you thinking. This sometimes leads to him sabotaging what would have been a perfectly fine song. “Corporation” is a funky jammer, with drum machines and plenty of bongos alongside White’s guitarwork. Yet just as you start getting into things as White shouts “who’s with me?” and “I’m thinking about starting a corporation,” he lets out a series of unholy squeals that take a significant amount of willpower not to turn down the volume for or skip. “Hypermisophoniac” would have been a great track if not for an underlying, repetitive electronic noise that sounds like a stalled SNES game. This sound is so grating not even Animal Collective could make it work on one of their songs. Examining the title, “misophonia” means “hatred of sound” and refers to a condition where specific noises trigger negative reactions, so White wanted the backtrack to actively annoy you. You may get his intent, but it’s hard to actually like the product – a statement that summarizes Boarding House Reach.
If new styles and strange sounds don’t hammer in the album’s weirdness enough, a number of spoken word interludes are interspersed throughout Boarding House Reach. The first of these, “Abulia and Akrasia,” features album guest C. W. Stoneking reading a poem of White’s that sounds like it was written with a thesaurus. “Everything You’ve Ever Learned” starts with White repeating an intro line three times, as if he were a malfunctioning tour guide, before launching into a forceful track where he does his best Jim Morrison impression. “Ezmerelda Steals The Show” is more childlike, underpinned by gentle guitar plucking, but this is immediately followed by yet another spoken word intro on “Get In the Mind Shaft.” What White says here ultimately depends on which version of the album you have, but all feature the most dramatic of synthesized strings in the background before transitioning into the track’s main section (which sounds like a slowed-down Chromeo outtake). White’s past projects have included small bits of spoken word here and there, but none felt as self-indulgent as these.
There are occasional flashes of the ghost of Jack White past on Boarding House Reach, which feel refreshing amidst the album’s eccentricities. “Over and Over and Over” kicks off with the kind of strong, guitar-driven melody that you’d expect from White. It’s arguably the strongest track, even with its vocal distortion effects and bongo breaks. “Respect Commander” starts with a nice instrumental jam session before slowing down for one of the more bluesy parts of the album. Boarding House Reach also closes innocuously enough, with the back-to-back of “What’s Done is Done” and “Humoresque.” The former is a country track that could have been on Blunderbuss, with synthesized organ appearing at the climax instead of guitar. The latter is White’s take on Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s classic of the same name, set to lyrics by…Al Capone? That’s right, White paid $18,750 for the sheet music at an auction, so you’re essentially hearing a Detroit musician singing the words of a Chicago gangster set to the tune of Czech composer.
The one certainty of Boarding House Reach is that it will be divisive. There will be no shortage of critics lining up to praise White’s ambition and unconventionality, hailing the album more as a “statement” akin to a modern art piece than any sort of commercial success. To their credit, it’s certainly not a boring or safe release, and White’s well-known strangeness (see: the whole Capone thing above) certainly seeps through most tracks. On the other hand, how much of those last 44 minutes did you actually enjoy? The album edges on unlistenable at its worst moments, while its best pale in comparison to the highs White has proven himself capable of reaching. This is no way is meant to condemn him to a particular mold, but Boarding House Reach is less an organic attempt to breathe new life into his music than it is a calculated show of self-deconstruction. It’s tempting to scrutinize each track and declare that you “get it” in a show of open-mindedness, but the more honest part of you will declare “no thanks.”
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