{"id":682590,"date":"2026-07-09T16:15:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T16:15:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/682590\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T16:15:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T16:15:13","slug":"jack-white-frozen-charlotte-review-brutal-squalid-blues-rock-that-just-about-sells-its-own-ridiculousness-jack-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/682590\/","title":{"rendered":"Jack White: Frozen Charlotte review \u2013 brutal, squalid blues-rock that just about sells its own ridiculousness | Jack White"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a strange thing to say about one of the most prolific artists of his \u2013 or any \u2013 generation, but: Jack White<\/a> has been undergoing something of a career renaissance of late. After firmly establishing himself as one of the most beloved and defining figures of 21st-century rock with his early-00s blues duo the White Stripes, White seemed to get bigger and bigger over the next decade-plus, releasing albums with well-liked side projects the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, dropping a couple of fine solo albums, and helping spark the music industry\u2019s vinyl revival with his label and pressing plant Third Man Records.<\/p>\n

Jack White: Frozen Charlotte.<\/p>\n

But, at some point in the mid-2010s \u2013 around the release of his third solo album, 2018\u2019s Boarding House Reach, let\u2019s say \u2013 White\u2019s influence and celebrity seemed to be outweighing his actual output, with rising pop stars like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo naming him a prime influence. Record plants the world over became backed-up, thanks to pop stars releasing dozens of gimmicky vinyl variants of their own albums, resulting in months-long delays for indie artists \u2013 hardly a problem White was responsible for (and likely one he himself was annoyed by), but certainly the result of a craze he had helped spark. At the same time, all the quirks and codes of White\u2019s output \u2013 the specific colour schemes and sometimes arcane guiding opinions \u2013 threatened to overwhelm the immediacy and sharpness that had once been the core of White\u2019s actual music.<\/p>\n

White has spent the past couple of years proving that reputation isn\u2019t all that important<\/a> if the music slaps. In 2024, he released his sixth album No Name<\/a> with little fanfare \u2013 unlabelled copies were slipped in with purchases at his Third Man stores, which is a kind of fanfare, just a more chill one \u2013 to overwhelmingly great response. Wholly comprised of the kind of mean-mugging blues-rock that he had made his name on, No Name\u2019s lean, raw songs were a welcome reminder that, beneath the huckster magician vibe, White was still deserving of his stature.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Jack White: Archbishop Harold Holmes \u2013 video<\/p>\n

Frozen Charlotte, White\u2019s follow-up to No Name, finds the 51-year-old digging his heels in further, wholly embracing the more brutal, squally and squalid side of the 70s blues rock that\u2019s always informed his work. Opener GOD and the Broken Ribs, a bolshie, ridiculous retelling of the Genesis story, sets the terms, with White rapping over a muscular blues chug, between histrionic guitar solos: \u201cWatch me rock, then I roll baby \/ And it\u2019s let me out, let me out, let me shout \/ Right from my soul, with salt and coal \/ Now listen to me roll with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 40-odd minutes that follow are loud and ostentatious and seemingly more focused on production and instrumentation than the witty, political No Name. Heavy delay effects give Raising the Grain a wobbly, enjoyably destabilised atmosphere, as White sings about how he\u2019s going to \u201cboil in linseed oil\u201d before he enters \u201cthe catacombs where the river flows\u201d. You\u2019ll Never Fix Me is an old-fashioned White garage barnstormer, its vaguely defiant lyrics seemingly less important than the immense sense of rebellion that seeps through in White and his band\u2019s nasty, anarchic riffs.<\/p>\n

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As on No Name, it is enjoyable to hear White back in this no-frills mode, with a fury and meanness in his voice that really sells a line like \u201cclick clack, back track, tick tock, smack talk\u201d. This is a pure form of fan service, but it\u2019s preferable to the overblown White solo records that preceded No Name, and will probably feel a whole lot better live than anything from, say, 2022\u2019s clowny Fear of the Dawn.<\/p>\n

Even so: while Frozen Charlotte is fun, and rarely feels laboured, it can be a lot. Unlike No Name, there is little stylistic variance between songs, and by the time you reach She\u2019s in a Frenzy, you start to wonder if the album has simply looped back to the start, and you\u2019re listening to the same overdriven guitar solos and sneery punk-rap from earlier. Frozen Charlotte works best when leaving this zone, as on Neighbors Blues, a genuinely bonkers potboiler that plays like a theme song for Neighbors, the HBO show from earlier this year about outlandish real-life disputes between people who share a fence. The simmering aggression renders the track far more effective in creating tension than many other songs on the record, which tend to play their hands early, neutering White\u2019s great sense of dynamics. It\u2019s an ironic quirk of the album as a whole: this record may be part of White\u2019s stripped-down renaissance, but it might have been helped by an even more back-to-basics approach.<\/p>\n

This week Shaad listened to<\/p>\n

Twisted Teens \u2013 Florida Water Blues
The first single from the breakout New Orleans punk duo\u2019s second album of 2026 softens the pace of their last record and dials up the soulfulness.<\/p>\n

Alexis Petridis is away<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a strange thing to say about one of the most prolific artists of his \u2013 or any…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":682591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-682590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/682591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}