The Earliest Bird: Top New Recorded Release 10-22-21-10-28-22, Jack White’s “Taking Me Back and “Taking Me Back (Gently)” Reviewed

Let’s take him back as far as 2012 and Jack White’s masterpiece, Blunderbuss. That’s the one with “Hypocritical Kiss,” “Missing Pieces”,” and “Sixteen Saltines”…. and “Love Interrupted” and a live show so great at Radio City Music Hall that the next day I bought a ticket for the second performance (here). But that was nine years ago and since then White hasn’t been the same guy, stuck between the strange and the creepy with an additional two bad albums (he is writing riffs instead of songs) and an additional two bad live performance, I was front row for one of them (Gov Ball -everybody was watching Skrillex) and it didn’t help.

It also didn’t help that White went on the record as not being keen on New York City: “I only go to New York if I have to, nothing feels special there when you’re creative, everyone feels like they’ve seen and done it all, hard for me to be inspired”. Unlike the inspirational Nashville, right?

Anyway it’s been nearly four years since his last album and now we have “Taking Me Back” and “Taking Me Back (Gently)”. The former a white hot, noise riff for sale, and the latter a 1920s style, at the cantina in Star Wars IV, rolling track. It is the theme for the Call of Duty: Vanguard xbox game, though what the lyric has to do with the uber-violent game I can’t say (wait, I can say: nothing).

Jack White was born for this time of year, with his children of the corn whiteness, blank stare, luddite attitude, he looks like a judge in Salem. I wonder what his kid make of having White as a daddy? I bet it’s terrifying, like one of those “Just Beyond” Disney+ episodes where an innocent child discovers his parents are from a another planet.

Grade: B