Frozen Charlotte
Jack White · Blues Rock
“You made a forty two minute album with no air in it and called the discomfort a genre.”
Seventh solo album, thirteen tracks, forty two minutes, produced by you at your own studio in Nashville, with cover art of a doll you sculpted yourself. At some point a man stops making records and starts building a shrine. Variety opened its review with the observation that you are pissed, as in really pissed, about something, and never quite worked out what. That is an accurate summary of Frozen Charlotte: the fury is total, the target is vague, and the guitar sound is magnificent. Critics have handed you universal acclaim and a Metacritic of eighty two, and I am not going to pretend that is wrong. When this record works it is genuinely thrilling, and you still write riffs like a man who thinks distortion is a moral position. But the complaints are consistent and they are fair. NME noted the album lacks the fire and variety of No Name and loses steam with same-y meanderers, naming Nobody Knows, Thick As Thieves and All Alone Again as tracks that get lost in the sludge. David Fricke put it more elegantly in Rolling Stone: there was more room to catch your breath in Led Zeppelin II than you leave here. That is the actual issue. Not quality, density. You have made a forty two minute album with no air in it, and the effect is that thirteen good songs blur into one long red-lit corridor. The Guardian described it as brutal, squalid blues-rock that just about sells its own ridiculousness, and the words just about are load bearing. You are one dynamic idea away from this being unarguable, and the idea is silence. Somewhere on this record, a song needed to get quiet, and you would not let it.
You remain the last major rock musician who behaves like the format still has stakes, and the results speak: number one on the UK independent chart, top thirty overall, top twenty in Australia, and the best reviews of your solo career outside No Name. When you land a line here you really land it, and the writing on Derecho Demonico has the compressed menace that made people care about you in the first place. You also built the thing yourself, top to bottom, studio to sculpture, which in an era of committee-assembled content is not nothing. Nobody listens to Frozen Charlotte and wonders who made it. That is a rarer achievement every year.
The album never once lets you breathe
“David Fricke, Rolling Stone: "There was more room to catch your breath in the swagger and density of Led Zeppelin II than you get in White's serial rush out of that devilry." NME's Andrew Trendell independently reached the same place, saying the album loses steam with same-y meanderers getting a little lost in the sludge.”
The fix Sequence one genuinely quiet track into the middle third and cut two of the mid-tempo grinders. Dynamics are not a compromise with the audience, they are how you make the loud parts hurt.
Three tracks doing the same job
“NME names Nobody Knows, Thick As Thieves and All Alone Again as the specific casualties, three songs that occupy near-identical tempo and texture across a thirteen track record.”
The fix Pick the strongest of the three, keep it, and repurpose the best riff from each of the others rather than shipping all three. Thirteen tracks with three duplicates is really ten tracks and a stamina test.
Rage without an object
“Chris Willman opened Variety's review with "Jack White is pissed. As in, really pissed, about something." On Nobody Knows you sing "Hey, I'm confused and I bet it shows", which is the album diagnosing itself more accurately than any critic managed.”
The fix Name the thing. One verse of specific, checkable detail about what actually angered you would give the other twelve tracks something to be angry at, and turn a mood into an argument.
The best writing proves the rest could be sharper
“From All Alone Again: "To find a needle in a haystack / Well it's plenty easy / You just burn down the haystack / And then you'll find what you need." A complete idea with a punchline, on a track NME singled out as one of the sludgy ones.”
The fix That image deserved a song built around it rather than a verse buried inside a grinder. When a lyric is that good, restructure the arrangement to serve it instead of burying it in the mix.
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