The Earliest Bird: The Top New Recorded Release 4-8-22 – 4-14-22, Jack White’s “Fear Of The Dawn” Reviewed

In 2012, Jack White released his first solo album, the magnificent Blunderbuss and nearly caused a riot at Radio City Music Hall where he played a truncated one hour set and disappeared without an encore. I was there and I thought the set was so great that I returned the next night (here), but I get why his fans were bummed. Jack has gone out of his way to announce his immense dislike for New Ypork City and to be honest, he has never been a favorite song. But a lot of his White Stripes material is excellent and so was his first solo set, it took till 2014 for him to lose the plot with increasingly brutal electric and digital arrangements of bad songs.

After that the most constant feeling was that White, as he went deeper into atonal electronics and songs that were riffs, he began to lose his audience. His performance at Barclay Center in April has a no cell phone rule and is far from sold out, it was one step too far. And today his latest album (the first of two this year), recorded alone during the heart of the pandemic, Fear Of The Dawn dropped today. It is a painfully experimental set of jams and the occasional good song thrown in. I count two, the Q-Tip featured Cab Calloway “Hi Do Ho” and penultimate “Morning, Noon And Night”.The blues songs occasionally peek through, “Shedding My Panic” is more like his last two albums, but there is something not right here. It isn’t working. And that’s the best of it if you include the single “Taking It Back”, otherwise it can be almost painful as he jumps off the deep end. Well, maybe it’s an experiment that doesn’t pay off. Let’s see what happens with the second album.

Grade: C