Jack White’s ‘Frozen Charlotte’ is One Earworm After the Next
Jack White, the patron saint of rowdy rock, is back with his new album Frozen Charlotte, released via his own label Third Man Records. Frozen Charlotte is White’s seventh studio album as a solo act, and White’s sharply-honed, grungy theatricality is on full display. Clever wordplay and existential musings are wrapped up in crunchy riffs and stomping beats.
Although White has been an indie rock household name for years, he hasn’t compromised any of his idiosyncrasies, instead letting them flourish. Never one to let the inspiration of fortuitous creative accidents go to waste, White turned a broken figurine in his recording studio into the album’s talisman. When a vintage carnival chalkware statue of a sailor boy fell over and was decapitated, White replaced the head with a blue skull percussion shaker, and the Frozen Charlotte avatar was born—a reference to the popular, mass-produced Victorian dolls of the same name born from a dark folk song about a girl who froze to death because she refused to wear a coat over her pretty dress. Materialism and ego death are recurring themes within Frozen Charlotte, and in true Jack White style, he knows how to make you listen.
Jack White’s specialty is earworm riffs, and the chugging, aggressive opening melody in “G.O.D. And The Broken Ribs” might be one of the best he’s ever conjured. This track reframes the Garden of Eden as a captivity story, of creation under pressure—“Welcome to the end of the world, yeah / Nobody left but one boy and one girl and one other / But you know we can't live like a sister and a brother / They're gonna makе you a mother now.” Part of White’s own personal history is mythologized with sly winks to the geography of his hometown of Detroit and infamous fake-sibling relationship with ex-wife and former collaborator Meg White. References to the dark side of popularity and sensationalism (cheap dime novels, penny dreadfuls, and the titular frozen Charlotte dolls) raise the questions: Is having something to sell the same as being a sell out? Once you get widely acclaimed success in your artistry, is the only place to go back to your roots? At least in this track, sense is craved over cents.
Frozen Charlotte has its fair share of classic loud rock, including the shouting, rhyming verses in “Raising the Grain,” the catchy electronic trill layered on top of blown-out guitar shredding in “You’ll Never Fix Me,” and the relentless, thumping rhythms in “All Alone Again” and “She’s in a Frenzy.” On “Derecho Demonico,” bluesy keyboard is matched with distorted keyboard tones, a tug-of-war between the influences of the past and present. Like the title suggests, the track inspires a demonic storm of activity. If you need a motivational soundtrack as you FAFO, turn to “Derecho Demonico” and its proclamation of “I got one rule: I don’t start nothing / nothing that I cannot finish.”
Noisy verses and screeching instrumental breaks are screams into the void as relationships and communication break down underneath the influence of consumption and transaction. “There’s Nobody There” is a raspy lament about smoke signals, flares, and radars that go ignored, sparking the paranoia that there’s no one to speak to at all because “If you know me then you’ll never love me.” “Nobody Knows” is a looping existential crisis that our understanding of our world is basically the same during every age—Do we really know that much more than we did a thousand years ago? (If anything, at least we still know how to rock.) Communication loses meaning in the buzzy “Making Contact.” Underneath the watchful eye of the omnipotent algorithm and the cult of content, can we ever take ownership of our ideas and desires, or are they subliminal reactions to inescapable ad campaigns?
Even the songs alluding to relationship dynamics have a transactional point of view. The twangy “Dollar Bill” shouts, “You can’t control me unless you owe me / And you don’t own me unless I owe you.” The repeated, rhyming onomatopoeia and miscommunication in “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” (“click clack, back track, tick tock, smack talk”) alludes to immaturity and incompatibility, whereas “Thick as Thieves” is connection based on mutual gain—although it brings to mind the warning that two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. “Neighbors Blues” is another standout Jack White earworm track that is immediately identifiable from its opening notes, and it’s an invitation to think beyond your literal backyard to America’s paranoid xenophobia and egotism contained within sharpened white picket fences.
Jack White’s seventh solo album is a testament to the fact there’s always more to say, to interpret and reinterpret—more grief, joy, exasperation, rage, humor—and he has an endless supply of riffs to drive the point home. You can listen wherever you stream your music.
