Jack White
No Name
Release Date: Aug 2, 2024
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Third Man Records
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Album Review: No Name by Jack White
Excellent, Based on 6 Critics
Based on rating 4.5/5
rock's NOT dead I have a confession to make. I'm one of those people with a guitar sitting in the corner of their room, untouched and untamed. It's like a promise I once made to myself, long gone unheeded. Sure, I can fuck around with the frets somewhat, but it took a goddamn pandemic just to get me to buy one, so what will it take for me to ever properly commit to learning how to play the thing? I've been entranced with the guitar and all the blissful sounds it can make for maybe longer than I have music itself.
Based on rating 4.5
His sixth solo work is wonderful, magical, truthful and the most consistently surprising rock album of the year Jack White is a true original, a mould-breaking one-of-one. He almost single-handedly revived rock music – traditional, blues-based rock music – at a time when most rockers were either wearing massive jeans and rapping or waiting for something like The Strokes to happen to show them a new way (the first The White Stripes album predates Is This It by two years). He's essentially written his own backstory, like a WWE wrestler, with the blend of fact and fiction being just about tantalising enough to not be utterly stupid.
Based on rating 8.5/10
"I'm here to tear down the institution," howls Jack White like a demented carnival barker in "Archbishop Harold Holmes," a spiked cocktail of twisted narrative that comes just before the mid-way point of his bracing new record, No Name. Since disbanding The White Stripes, White has built a few institutions of his own in amassing an unlikely rock and roll empire. But No Name sheds any pretense to legacy building; it's an exhilarating, scorched earth blast.
Based on rating 8/10
Just as Radiohead and their melodramatic pallbearers were lifting Alt-Rock into the gussied, experimental stratosphere, Jack walked into the wrong metaphorical room with a garage rock revolution in tow, ready to revise their progress. At the height of his duo's fame, they fractured; his solo return subverted the hopes of longtime listeners with coffee-house rock and a disciplined adherence to tradition. Just as the kids trickled out and the boomers waded their way in, he estranged his fanbase yet again with Boarding House Reach and its subsequent experimental followups, more in tune to RateYourMusic forums and psychedelic trips than his recent easy-listening trend.
Based on rating 7/10
These days, the fun is hearing him dig back into the raw, straight-from-the-gut blues punk ferocity that made so many fans anoint White the standard-bearer for old-school rock traditionalism. It's a direction he's been going since the Raconteurs' 2019 comeback on Help Us Stranger. On his new surprise album, which White handed out last week to unsuspecting shoppers at his Third Man Records locations, he doubles down on the electrified distortion-mongering of 2022's Fear of the Dawn, bashing out the bluesiest rock riffs that he's released since the White Stripes.
Opinion: Excellent
The music business needs a superhero, and a vigilante label boss may just be the person for it. The rapid devaluation of artistry prompted by the weightlessness of streaming over the past decade has been a threat to Jack White's obsession with all things analogue. To combat the looming stagnation of the flat-surfaced digital era, he has cultivated an inimitable marque by playing with color codes, texture, arrangement and technology in a series of attempts at preserving traditions that bring people closer together.
'No Name'
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