“Every time I go in, I’m trying to do something I haven’t done before,” Jack White recently explained. “And it’s not like something that other people have never done before. It’s just something I have never done before.” This quest for novelty is quite a challenge after a prolific career with the White Stripes, which explored various genres across 20th-century rock, blues, country, pop, punk, and soul; successful ventures with the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather; and a solo discography that evolved from organic to electronic sounds.
Speaking to Apple’s Zane Lowe, White discussed making his new album mostly alone during lockdown, much like many other musicians during the pandemic. Instead of bringing in seasoned musicians for his band, White played almost every instrument himself, aligning with his pursuit of new creative avenues. “I made mistakes,” he continued. “I would play drums last, which you’re not supposed to do. But then I started to feed off of that. I thought, ‘I like that.’ I liked that it was wrong.”
The result is Fear Of The Dawn, the first of two new Jack White albums dropping this year. Releasing tomorrow, it achieves White’s aim of exploring uncharted musical territories, some more rewarding than others. Does it deliver the same thrill as De Stijl, White Blood Cells, or Icky Thump? No, but a decade into his solo career, no one, except perhaps Jack White himself, expects it to. The key question is whether this music will offer enjoyable moments or an endurance test for those already invested in the Jack White experience. (Newcomers should start with a White Stripes record; they have a lot of joy to discover.)
To understand why White’s solo career has been underwhelming for some, I revisited his three albums prior to Fear Of The Dawn. The best of these, 2012’s Blunderbuss, leaned heavily into the Beatles’ influence that occasionally surfaced in White Stripes albums. From there, Lazaretto and Boarding House Reach veered further into experimental jam sessions, drifting from the brilliant songwriting that defined the White Stripes. This Beatles resemblance got me thinking about the parallels between Fear Of The Dawn and Paul McCartney’s own quarantine album, McCartney III, which changed how I listened to White’s new record.
Upon its release, my colleague Tom Breihan wrote that Blunderbuss “sounds like it was knocked out over a lazy back-porch afternoon” and was all the better for it. Fear Of The Dawn does not sound lazy, but it does sound loose. The record feels like White experimenting in the studio, trying out new directions until he finds something he likes. In spirit, and sometimes in substance, it’s similar to the unpolished gems McCartney created in his home studio. However, being Jack White, there’s a lot more guitar heroism and an intensified Jerry Lee Lewis electrocuted-howler persona. But if you’re intrigued by a journey into the fringes of Jack White’s imagination, you may find value in this exercise.
Fear Of The Dawn is easily White’s heaviest solo album. The magnificent title track, with its rumbling low-end guitar groove, might as well be Queens Of The Stone Age. White often unleashes fierce guitar riffs enhanced by quirky harmonic pitch-shifting, backed by heavy, straightforward beats. Colorful bursts of piano, organ, and synthesizer pop in and out of the mix, as do heavily processed lead guitar parts. White’s vocals remain raw and wild-eyed, but the music behind him has never been more carnivalesque, for better and worse. “Eosophobia” shifts between dubby bass, arena-rock bombast, and jazzy prog keyboards — encapsulating the album’s mad-scientist vibes.
Not all of these experiments succeed. The Cab Calloway-sampling Q-Tip collaboration “Hi De Ho” is a post-genre monstrosity that plays out like an ugly cartoon. The vocoder-laden “Into The Twilight” is similarly gaudy. Yet even the most obnoxious songs on Fear Of The Dawn will likely energize White’s live performances due to the album’s visceral power. When White shapes his ideas into actual songs, like the thunderous “That Was Then (This Is Now),” the chopped-up battering ram “What’s The Trick,” the jaunty stomper “Morning, Noon, And Night,” and the aggressive opener “Taking Me Back,” it’s clear why fans care about him. Some of his outbursts also recall his old, sidelong wisdom: “Plus-one and minus-one is zero/ That’s a defeatist attitude!”
Lyrical motifs run through the tracklist, with the theme of fearing the dawn being most prominent. “Eosophobia” literally means “fear of the dawn,” and in it, White declares, “I don’t fear you/ I fear the dawn/ I fear the sun coming on!” Other titles include “Dusk,” “Into The Twilight,” and “Morning, Noon, And Night.” White has sung about isolating himself from the world at least since Lazaretto, and it’s easy to imagine him embracing a nocturnal lifestyle as part of this self-protective mindset, supported by lines like “My motives are invisible/ My armor is invincible!” and “This is my first, my worst, my past, and my last imperfect effort/ 100 insults left on my windshield in the morning.”
White’s lyrics suggest he might be fixated on the backlash to his cantankerous public persona and how it has overshadowed his post-Stripes musical output. “You’re taking me back,” he exclaims in the opener. “I’ll bet you do, but not for long!” Later, he confides, “I’m dead to the world, but not to you.” The closing track, “Shedding My Velvet,” a mystic blues vamp with prog and jazz fusion elements, hints he might be ready to reemerge. Amid pounding pianos and slicing wah-wah guitar, he muses, “Think horses, not zebras when you hear the sound of hooves on the ground/ You are the heliotrope who loves the sun as it goes round and round.” But in the song’s soft acoustic finale, there’s a sense of resolution: “Better to illuminate than merely to shine/ You say this all the time/ And you’re right.”
Does White believe he has something to teach the world? Is he ready to share more of himself, despite his cautious public stance? Fear Of The Dawn may not be a wise dispatch or a revealing self-portrait, but it’s a wild ride that ensures new songs will hit hard in his setlists and piques curiosity for the subtler, folkier sounds of his upcoming Entering Heaven Alive. While many might find this album challenging, considering it as a fun, left-field turn from a rock legend, akin to McCartney III, makes it more appealing. If White insists on pushing his music to strange new places, at least he’s made sure it rocks extremely hard.
Fear Of The Dawn is out 4/8 via Third Man Records.