Jack White is an asshole. Look Bill Holdship calls him an asshole and if Bill calls him an asshole he is an asshole so EVEN IF YOU COULD IGNORE YOUR OWN EYES AND WONDER IF MAYBE HE ISN’T AN ASSHOLE, he is still an asshole. Front row at his gig at Governors Ball last week Jack was an asshole, he was an aggressive fuck to his band and an obnoxious MC, scrawling and scratching his white noise riffs all over his songs like a graffiti artist tagging a tombstone.
Yeah, at Govs Ball he was both generous with the set and venal to an audience he is on record as to be sick of, glad handing them when you get the feeling he wants to throttle them. White is such an asshole, it effects your ability to listen to him. Fuck, he is such an asshole he won’t let his children use the internet.
So while a nice guy, say Kenny Wayne Shepherd, gets given the benefit of the doubt, White never does: why give it to him? A couple of years I almost begrudged him the brilliance of his Radio City Music Hall concert and just the other day on Facebook I gleefully noted how we could go back to hating White again.
Lazaretto begins with a bang, than wanders the rest of the way to the end with a mix of blues and country, and then it ends. It is overwritten and underplayed, it fits like when you get a favorite sofa upholstered, it is all wrong angles (and if you think that metaphor sucks try David Fricke’s hysterical 4 star review in Rolling Stone). After “Three Women” -a rewrite of Willie McTell’s classic to kick off the proceedings, followed closely by the closest he has gotten to EDM with the title track’s heavy drums and a killer guitar break, the album seems yo stagger. The third song, “Temporary Ground” is a terrible , whiny whiffle friend drag, “Moving Without follows it with the tedious slow blues of “Would You Fight For My Love”, then two goodies and then nothing that great till the end of the album.
Oh, “That Black Cat Licorice” is a rollicking success and “I Think I Know The Culprit” isn’t the worst song ever, the classical flourishes are funny but overdrawn, and “Want And Able” is a nice nursery rhyme coda for the event. But it isn’t that good either. There are four songs as bad as anything he hasn’t ever written and the good ones aren’t quite good enough to make up for them. It is, the word is, mediocre. The songs aren’t good enough, Jack’s voice grates by the end because there isn’t enough oomph to bring it all back home, and if you think Jack is an asshole any way, there is no reason to do much but dismiss it.
Grade: B
