There are no lyrics for this new Jack White’s tune but honestly ‘High Ball Stepper’ doesn’t need any! Plus, nobody is going to take this stomping, aggressive, blistering, bluesy thing, that the ex-White Stripes frontman dropped on April fools’ day, for a joke… it is made to boil your blood and explode your head in a series of dopamine-filled-outbursts. Actually the song goes to sleep and wakes up a few times, like a beast that doesn’t want to give up… just listen till the last second! It’s a great trip, high in reverb and dissonance, very cinematic, installing great suspense and momentum, and keeping you at the edge of your seat. Jack White is not a sentimental, he trashes the place in 3 minutes with giant riffs, but this fuzz chaos is astonishingly elegant, punctuated by piano keys and especially high-pitch repetitive alarm noises that almost sound like human voices going berserk. I don’t know how he produces all these types of sounds but since he is very old-fashioned guy, there are a lot of chances all this comes from real instruments.
‘High Ball Stepper’ is the first song we hear from ‘Lazaretto’, White’s upcoming album due June 10th on Third Man Records/Columbia, but it’s not the single, and we will be able to listen to the first single, called ‘Lazaretto’ like the album, very soon.
While speaking to Rolling Stone magazine, Jack White described the new album as follows: ‘It’s definitely not one sound, it’s definitely several. Like you heard in ‘Blunderbuss,’ there’s many different styles there. I don’t pick my style and then write a song. I just write whatever comes out of me, and whatever style it is what it is, and it becomes something later.’
How not blasting this track to the max? Honestly, it is gonna fuck up a lot of speakers, and I have played it in repeat since Tuesday afternoon. Badass? Empowering? The soundtrack for the next Tarantino flick? A lot of comparisons are gonna be made with the Black Keys’ latest release, ‘Fever’, that was released a few days ago and that Iman found ridiculously blank… I also think ‘High Ball Stepper’ is vastly superior and much more innovative and since Jack White has a beef against Dan Auerbach, he is getting the last word.
