Where to start with the mutoid sprawl of Jack White’s new album? The protean retro rock cudmudgeon has always traced his musical roots back to rock's baptismal waters of the Mississippi Delta but he's also followed his own tributaries throughout his varied career.
On his third solo album, you can forget about the kitchen sink - he's thrown a whole plumbing works into a record that races about and zig-zags with audacious stylistic flourishes. It never sits still as it ricochets between frazzled Zappaeque (meets Captain Beefheart) gonzo rock to gospel, seventies funk, New Orleans jazz to - gulp - rap.
He’s a musical polymath for sure but White’s more analogue-than-thou sniffiness can be off-putting. Didn’t it always feel like everything he recorded had to be done so on a four-track bought from a certain shop in Chicago in 1952?
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Well, for this new sonic sprawl he did, indeed, lock himself into an apartment in Nashville (where else?) to record on a quarter-inch four track recorder and a simple mixer. But then this bête noire of pro tools and digital then mixed the whole thing on a computer. It’s enough to get a vinyl purist weeping into their flat white.
No matter because aided by a dizzying line-up of musicians that includes personnel who have graced records by Beyoncé, Kanye West, Fishbone, and Depeche Mode, Boarding House Reach is a spellbinding and only occasionally self-indulgent delight.
Take Corporation. It may start as a Sly and The Family Stone style call to consciousness with a very groovy seventies funk soul vamp but it soon percolates into a kind of sub Led Zep freak-out meets protest rock with a gleefully subversive sense of humour.
Over and Over and Over, originally written for The White Stripes, may be the most conventional-sounding song here as White sings about his "Sisyphean dreamer." (Atlas also gets a mention) over heavily compressed and distorted guitars, while Respect Commander’s orgiastic guitar noodling a la Voodoo Chile collapses into a warm space rock fade-out.
The cosmic riffing and sense of abandon continues on the squelchy seventies mind funk of Get In The Mind Shaft, a collision of talking box vocals and Doorsian vibes and xylophone and even if White draws breath on What's Done is Done, a drawled country blues that nods to Emmylou and Gram, his third album remains a series of haywire jams. Diverse and genre skipping, listening to Boarding House Reach feels like being on a runaway train on fire.
Alan Corr @corralan
