Fear of the Dawn brings Jack White back from the precipice of his experimental misadventures, without taking things all the way back.
I was not a fan of Jack White’s third solo album Boarding House Reach. After two solid, blues-rock solo albums – 2012’s Blunderbuss and 2014’s Lazaretto – 2018’s Boarding House Reach discarded almost everything fans knew and loved about the guitar virtuoso in favor of weirdness for weird’s sake. White redeemed himself a bit by releasing Help Us Stranger with the Raconteurs the following year, but White’s solo career had this peculiar blemish on it. When White announced his fourth solo album Fear of the Dawn, I wondered if he’d get back on track to rocking out or go further down the Boarding House Reach rabbit hole of self-indulgent wankery.
Fear of the Dawn brings Jack White back from the precipice of his experimental misadventures, without taking things all the way back. It attempts to strike a balance between the simple Jack White we’ve known and loved since the White Stripes and the Jack White the eccentric, who does everything with as much flair as possible. Fear of the Dawn favors the former style, demonstrating that White does not need to rely on gimmicks, and is at his best when focusing on bread-and-butter songwriting.
The first few tracks on Fear of the Dawn will immediately fill anyone who disliked Boarding House Reach with great relief. “Taking Me Back” kicks things off with a punching riff, a combination of cymbal crashes and steady snares, arcade-like synthesizers, and White’s shouts. It segues seamlessly into the second track “Fear of the Dawn,” and the songs are best enjoyed coupled together. This title track is a real standout, combining a Black Sabbath-sounding guitar riff with the periodic ghoul-like howls and shrieks of a theremin, and it also includes one of the album’s best guitar solos. Third track “The White Raven” keeps things going with the most gratuitous distortion heard on any Jack White production. This opening salvo is the hardest White has ever rocked, and it’ll probably put off anyone who would cringe at the album’s first track being used for a Call of Duty video game’s promotional video. That said, if you’re willing to dumb yourself down and/or are pissed off, these straightforward rockers are great fun.
Of course, White would never make an entire album of straightforward tracks, and much of Fear of the Dawn is full of offbeat choices. “Hi-De-Ho” sticks out for having a guest verse by rapper Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest. White loaned his guitar talents to the hip-hop group on their final album We Got It From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service, so maybe Q-Tip was repaying the favor here. The whole track is based around a sample of jazz singer Cab Calloway (“The Hi-De-Ho Man”), and while peculiar and showy, it’s entertaining. More grating is “Into the Twilight,” which takes a three-chord progression that sounds like it could have come from the Black Keys’ “Let’s Rock” and repeats it with a dizzying array of effects thrown in. There are vocal samples, random synthesizer noises, and scattered guitar effects. It’s the messiest track on the album, and is a little too close to Boarding House Reach for comfort.
The album’s other quirks are less front-and-center. “Eosophobia” (which means “fear of the dawn or daylight,” like the album title) and its companion “Eosophobia (Reprise)” both occasionally veer into a dub-like bassline, before introducing guitar riffs that are the furthest you can get from reggae. There’s a little too much going on here, especially when you add in White’s boastful declarations that he can control the sun. “What’s the Trick” has the double bass drum of a metal song, which combined with White’s semi-rapped verses recall the Red Hot Chili Peppers a bit. It sounds ridiculous, and it is, but it’s not something you’ll easily forget. “Shedding My Velvet” is subdued and bluesy, really letting its bass line come to the fore, and works well as the album’s closing track.
Once you get past these more unconventional sounds, you may realize that parts of Fear of the Dawn rely on very simple guitar melodies, often just the same few chords repeated throughout the song, with comparably uncomplicated drumming. If this sounds familiar, it’s because these descriptors sum up the White Stripes. That’s right, for better or worse, Fear of the Dawn sounds more like the White Stripes than anything else White has done since. “That Was Then, This is Now,” sounds a ton like an outtake from Icky Thump, and you’d swear Meg White was on the drums (Jack actually played almost all instruments himself). “Morning, Noon and Night” is similarly straightforward and Stripes-sounding, with just an organ’s notes letting you know this is the Jack White of the 2020s.
It should be noted that White will be releasing another second solo album in a few months called Entering Heaven Alive. This second album will allegedly be rooted in folk and country, which makes Fear of the Dawn its heavier, rock-centric, companion. This is a fair summary, and the album is overall cohesive despite the stark differences between its songs. There are no major switches in genre, and it really hammers in the “day and night” theme through both its lyrics and half of its track titles. However, its weirder impulses occasionally go beyond giving tracks a distinguishable character and into distracting excess. It doesn’t quite reach what White has shown he’s capable of with its first couple solo releases, but it’s far from his worst.
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