Jack White
No Name
★★★★
Third Man
Little Room isn’t, perhaps, the most celebrated song in The White Stripes catalogue. It appears halfway through 2001’s White Blood Cells, lasts for a mere 50 seconds, and largely consists of Jack White scatting over the most rudimentary of Meg White beats. The 20 seconds of lyrics, though, effectively summarise a paradox White has been grappling with, happily enough, for a good two decades.
The song, if you don’t remember it too well, is a portrait of the lo-fi artist “working on something good” in the titular Little Room but, a few months away from unimaginable fame, contemplating what happens next when “If it's really good/ You're gonna need a bigger room.” Bigger rooms, of course, bring their own challenges. In them, White counsels, “You might not know what to do/ You might have to think of how you got started/ Sitting in your little room.”
When The White Stripes became a global phenomenon in the early 2000s, White initially remained evangelical about recording in the most primitive environments. “At that time the most punk thing I could muster up in my brain to rebel against was this new digital world where everything is made out of plastic and everything just felt so fake and disposable,” he recalled to MOJO’s Andrew Male in 2018.
Gradually, though, White found new ways to expand on his musical vision. Pro-tools, once anathema, were creatively embraced. Hip-hop production was pronounced “the punk rock of right now” around the ultra-processed curio of 2018’s Boarding House Reach. His whole solo career in fact, climaxing with 2022’s double whammy of Fear Of The Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive, has often felt like a precarious but fascinating negotiation between honouring rock and roots tradition while vigorously – and eccentrically – updating them.
No Name, the sixth Jack White solo album that is now receiving a more orthodox release, generally eschews such conceits. To call it a return to garage rock would be something of an oversimplification, given that White has recorded plenty of songs fitting that description in the past few years – the title track, That Was Then (This Is Now) and Morning, Noon And Night from Fear Of The Dawn, for starters.
What No Name represents, though, is a return to a sonic aesthetic White has generally avoided for the past decade. It may be risky to presume No Name was recorded DIY, all analogue, but it certainly leans heavily on the signifiers of raw punk authenticity: the frisson of guitar, bass (from longtime foil Dominic Davis, White’s wife Olivia Jean and his daughter Scarlett), drums (played by Raconteur Patrick Keeler or Olivia Jean) and occasional organ, recorded unadorned at the Third Man Studio in Nashville. The gleaming steel textures, the Pro-Tooled jump cuts, the collagist mischief, the guitar frequencies that sound like morse code signals transmitted by dentists’ drills – none of these latterday White angles have much of an explicit place on No Name.
Instead, we’re roughly transported to a point way back on an alternative, dislocated timeline of rock history: one where Led Zeppelin rather than The Beatles and The Stones inspired the ur-punk attack of the Nuggets generation. Archbishop Harold Holmes, for instance, has the priapic, staccato charge of an econo-jammed Immigrant Song, albeit with a funky rhythm dynamic and White’s Vaudevillian take on rap, aligning it to previous rock-rap hybrids like What’s The Trick (from Fear Of The Dawn) or That Black Bat Licorice (from 2014’s Lazaretto).
Some familiar White touchstones like Led Zeppelin and Detroit rockers from The MC5 to The Gories loom large, while others like Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan are less detectable than usual. The blues, too, are more prominent than they have been in a while – check the slide heroics of Underground, the low-slung prowl of opener Old Scratch Blues (key lyric: “You’re gonna find out/ Everything you need to give for free/ To be a sellout.”).
As ever, though, White is a master at expressing his range within tight, self-imposed restrictions. No Name is packed end to end with tracks that balance great riffs and catchy tunes, but the album’s strongest sequence begins halfway through Side One. It kicks off with the Delta nursery rhyme of It’s Rough On Rats (If You’re Asking) - perhaps, alongside Missionary’s brute ramalam, No Name’s most White Stripes-like moment. Archbishop Harold Holmes’ histrionics come next, then hardcore rager I’m Bombing Out and, finally, the tensely dramatic build of What’s The Rumpus? The latter’s relative stealth has echoes of White’s Raconteurs debut from 2006, Steady, As She Goes - a song that, perhaps not coincidentally, has cropped up in White’s live sets in the past few days.
“When will the label dump us?” he sings on What’s The Rumpus? “They tried to stump us/ Now what genre will they lump us?” The answer, as White will be all too aware, superficially seems to be an easy one. From the moment his fans and critics found No Name, given away at White’s Third Man stores to surprised and delighted customers on July 19, that narrative of the fabled “return to form” has coalesced around this admittedly exceptional record. Is this what Jack White should be doing: privileging garage rock reductivism over more capricious, baroque studio experiments? Releasing vinyl albums on the sly? “The world is worse than when we found it,” he seethes on It’s Rough On Rats, reassuming the role of Jeremiah that suited him so well at the start of the millennium.
The truth, though, is always a lot more complicated than that, and No Name is a much more nuanced record, more of a piece with White’s entire varied discography, than it might have first appeared. “I thought I knew it all/ I thought I knew everything,” he howls amidst the crunching psychedelia of Terminal Archenemy Endling. But White has always been more open and self-critical than his naysayers would have you believe. Looked at from a distance now, his whole career has been one of confounding expectations and taking unexpected risks, occasionally verging on self-sabotage. There’s always something new to learn, unlearn or relearn, is the subtext, something to try for the first time or the 500th – and whatever the size of room you might be in.
No Name is out now on Third Man Records.
LISTEN/BUY: Spotify | Apple Music | Rough Trade
Track List
Old Scratch Blues
Bless Yourself
That’s How I’m Feeling
It’s Rough On Rats (If You’re Asking)
Archbishop Harold Holmes
Bombing Out
What’s the Rumpus
Tonight (Was A Long Time Ago)
Underground
Number One With A Bullet
Morning at Midnight
Missionary
Terminal Archenemy Ending
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Picture: David James Swanson