Jack White
BLUNDERBUSS
Columbia
The good news is that Jack White’s first solo album sounds ruled by his real-time nervous system. He’s made an album of impetuousness and instinctive design: He’s allowed first-take buzzes and imperfections, created whole songs out of small and fast notions.
Forcible freshness-protection is his first talent. Parts of the making of Blunderbuss have looked like an aesthetic health regimen: Releasing a single on flexi-disc by means of helium balloon from the doors of his Nashville record-label office, as he did on April 1; forming separate male and female bands and taking both on tour, then calling on each at his whim; arranging an overwrought, almost violent ode to love — that would be this album’s Love Interruption — for Wurlitzer organ, clarinet and shaky vocal harmony.
Strange, then, that the excellent ingredients don’t make the album better. Something’s missing. White essentially directed the White Stripes from 1997 to 2007 as its singer, guitarist, songwriter and producer; he then went on to other bands in which he had a less dominating role, the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, and he’s produced several dozen vinyl singles and albums, with the resources of his own studio and label, Third Man. But Blunderbuss is the work that seems to come closest to his own vision since the close of the White Stripes, and it can help bring into focus what made the older group so good.
Here, on Blunderbuss, is White’s electric guitar sound, digitally altered and cartoonishly flexible, set off from the archaisms he likes to put around him; here’s his singing, high and intense; there’s his production, with big cymbals and big reverb. What’s not here so much is the mysterious, paramusical part: the sense of occasion, the strength of the gesture.
Granted, it’s a categorically different project. With the White Stripes, economy of scale gave him a built-in organizing principle, and a kind of critical distance. They slayed within fixed limits, using aspects of blues, rockabilly, punk and glam-rock to perform, essentially, disruptions and meta-commentaries. Blunderbuss isn’t arch like that. It isn’t so into radical juxtapositions. It’s not severe; it’s familiar and welcoming — when soft (the slithering On and On and On), when loud (the Stripesy Sixteen Saltines) and when medium (the country-rock waltz I Guess I Should Go to Sleep). For an artist so heavily into artifice, this album breathes the easier air of classic rock and old country music; much of it feels relaxed, almost natural.
Few songs on Blunderbuss truly knock the wind out of you, as the White Stripes could — even with riffs that were fragmentary, simple or borrowed. This is a songwriter’s record, and a kind of orchestrator’s record; there’s also a new overall vehemence in the lyrics, hammering on dishonesty, jealousy, immorality. (“Who the hell’s impressed by you?” he sings in Hypocritical Kiss. “I want names of the people/that we know that are falling for this.”) But the meat of the songs — riffs, chord progressions, dynamic shifts — feel less distinguished.
The mainstays of the record’s players are members of what will be the female touring band, including the drummer Carla Azar of the Los Angeles band Autolux, the acoustic upright bassist Bryn Davies and the pianist Brooke Waggoner. Others pass in and out, Nashville musicians of different kinds: the country session-player Fats Kaplin, Lillie Mae Rische of the country-rock band Jypsi, the guitarist Jake Orrall from the garagey duo Jeff the Brotherhood. It’s both a core band record and an extended-cast record, and maybe that’s part of the problem: Despite all White’s small good ideas, it doesn’t have a big, binding, group-sound one.
So I find myself looking for great moments. Weep Themselves to Sleep has one of the best: a guitar solo by White that’s actually a pair of them, one in each channel, itchy and needling, fighting one another. And his version of Little Willie John’s I’m Shakin the record’s only cover, is one long great moment: overdriven, exacting, uptight, unnatural.
— BEN RATLIFF, NY Times News Service
Sarah Jaffe
THE BODY WINS
Kirtland
Sarah Jaffe doesn’t get specific about back stories in the songs on The Body Wins, her second album, but one thing is clear: They’re not placid.
Jaffe, a songwriter from Denton, Texas, was mostly folky and straightforward on her 2010 debut album, Suburban Nature, singing about longing, pain, falling apart and surviving despite herself. This time the lyrics are splintered, though they still hint at bitter aftermaths of romance and addiction. “There’s always a point, a point of no return/Always something to give up, always something to learn,” she sings in Mannequin Woman, which plugs along, dark but poppy, like Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams.
Her voice holds a wounded determination. It’s full of scrapes and quavers, and capable of both Fiona Apple’s acidity and Feist’s suppleness (though sometimes she’s overly close to Feist).
For this album, Jaffe largely set aside her guitar. Her new songs can turn orchestral, head for big (but troubled) choruses or blast into rock as she does in Talk, which piles buzz-bomb electric guitars onto a sparse electro beat. She and her producer, John Congleton, come up with barbed pop structures like The Body Wins, a tango-like rocker with muscular brass and shards of dissonance, and Glorified High, which uses blotchy distortion for its beat and bass line on the way to an accusatory, mock-triumphal chorus.
She shows a quieter side, too, but without getting conventionally folky. There are somber piano marches, like The Way Sound Leaves a Room; a string section backs her in Foggy Field, as she gently sings, “Sometimes second chances haunt me.” In Fangs, an arrangement with clarinets and saxophone hints at the warmth of the Band, and Jaffe overdubs herself into a choir. But she’s singing, “Water to wine/She’s got fangs like mine.” There’s no unmixed sweetness on this album, only partly healed scars.
— JON PARELES, NY Times News Service
Kenny Garrett
SEEDS FROM THE UNDERGROUND
Mack Avenue
The alto and soprano saxophonist Kenny Garrett acknowledges many sources of inspiration on his engagingly robust new album, Seeds From the Underground. Most of the acknowledgments are fairly obvious: a postbop workout called J. Mac is for the saxophonist Jackie McLean, and an urgent waltz called Haynes Here is for the drummer Roy Haynes. Detroit is a tribute to Garrett’s hometown; Welcome Earth Song concerns his home planet.
There’s a sincere motive behind all this naming. Garrett, 51, seems eager to attest to the influences, both personal and environmental, that made him the artist he is. More, then: Du-Wo-Mo, is for Duke Ellington, Woody Shaw and Thelonious Monk; Wiggins refers to an old band teacher. But what about his former mentor, Miles Davis? Or his lodestar, John Coltrane? He’s made each one the focus of a previous album, which would seem to suffice.
Still, it’s hard to put Coltrane far out of mind here. Garrett’s sound is tart and gusty, bordering on perfervid, but with a pinpoint-accurate expenditure of energy. Like Coltrane he’s an expert in strategies of escalation, often worrying a melodic phrase into a mantra, and then a rant, before drawing down again.
He has also groomed his sidemen to evoke Coltrane’s 1960s quartet: Benito Gonzalez has a forcefully oblique piano style derived from McCoy Tyner, and Ronald Bruner pummels his drums with a polyrhythmic fury descended from Elvin Jones. So what separates this album from historical re-enactment is twofold: the attitude and the material.
Garrett has a taste for funkiness in his writing, even when he leaves no trace of a backbeat (but especially when he does). The better of these compositions suggest the pithy durability and deceptive simplicity of folk songs. This can backfire, as it does on Welcome Earth Song, with a melody as grating as a car alarm, made all the more so by its group vocals (singing the title phrase, ad nauseam).
It’s clear that the band — which also features the bassist Nat Reeves and the percussionist Rudy Bird — has a comfort zone. The promise of melodic abstraction held out by Ballad Jarrett, for the pianist Keith Jarrett, leaves everyone sounding a little strained, Gonzalez especially. But what this group does well, it does commandingly, which means Garrett is reaping his own rewards.
— NATE CHINEN, NY Times News Service
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