CD reviews
JACK WHITE Boarding House Reach
DETROIT rock legend Jack White needs no introduction. When it’s all said and done, he has already achieved more than enough to be considered one of the greats of his generation. Retirement is a long way off, so what does he do in the meantime? It’s too early for someone like White — who has the same feverish tenacity for music now that he did in the late 1990s — to quit. Instead, he has opened his mind to new things. That doesn’t mean writing a techno-metal album. Nah. His third solo album takes a new approach to writing and recording. No longer the Luddite, White has stepped into the future by using modern studio techniques instead of stubbornly clinging to his old-school bluesman persona. A side-effect of this shift is how it’s allowed his sound to expand exponentially.
Ice Station Zebra sees White almost rapping his lines while the beat switches over and over. The opener Connected by Love fuses gospel with a Zeppelin riff. He does electro-funk ( Get In the Mind Shaft), a heavy rocker ( Over and Over Again) and a country ballad, too ( What’s Done is Done). The album is glorious in the way it restlessly cannot sit still. Just when you think you’ve got a hold on it, it changes again. It’s a radical, experimental album that never loses its sense of self. It’s unexpectedly fresh.
GEORGE FITZGERALD All That Must Be
I TOTALLY forgot how much I enjoyed George FitzGerald’s debut album back in 2015. And that is weird, because he is right up my alley. His second album, All That Must Be, treads a fine line between deep electronic soundscapes and otherworldly atmospheres blended with a little house and garage. His melodies tend to be perfectly sorrowful and downcast. One of his favourite crutches is FitzGerald’s tricky studio-affected, textured vocals on a whispered songs such as Frieda. Somehow the soul of a song with actual singing ( Roll Back) is mimicked by Frieda, even without “real” vocals. Lil Silva’s haunting tone singing “Is it cold when you’re dreaming?” over and over on Roll Back brings forth goosebumps. When the forlorn synth lead drops in the song’s back end, the whole album lifts to a new level. There is yearning on the iridescent Nobody But You, and skipping, booty-shaking on Outgrown. There are some genuine nightclub moments, such as the acidic Siren Calls, but they are few and far between. FitzGerald’s Tracey Thorn collaboration is icy cool and closer to Everything But the Girl’s sound than anything on her own new album — it’s great.