4/5
Year Of The Detroit Tiger.
Baseball season is upon us and walking to the mound in this Year of the Tiger, Jack White is about to deliver the National Anthem on opening day for the stripes of Detroit's very own MLB franchise. But the piston of vinyl pressed Third Man Records off the assembly line of The White Stripes, Raconteurs and Dead Weather supergroups has another curveball to throw our way. He's about to double-up this year. Pitching and hitting like the best since the Bambino, Babe Ruth, Japan's big Shohei Ohtani, with two albums over the calendar, but not on the same Guns N' Roses day like a Nelly 'Sweatsuit'. First comes 'Fear Of The Dawn', knocking it out of the park on the first day of the season of taking us to the ball game. All before the slowed down, easy like Commodore Sunday morning 'Entering Heaven Alive' will round for home on the 22nd of July. Two days after my birthday...just saying! Music really is sacred for the Cochella speech statesman, swinging for the fence. One who back home spent time retooling not only his sound, but his interior design during lockdown. Forging himself a career in home furnishing during the planets pandemic. IKEA, look out! Not to mention, experimenting with a new look. No longer looking like Michael Jackson in raven curls, or the demon from 'Sinister'. Thank God. After seeing said Ethan Hawke movie I actually didn't want to go to a Jack White gig my friend invited me to, that s### was so scary. "Why not". "Erm...f### him! That's why. I'm just not going. Mind your business." But it's all love like the blue rinse that now gives White a fresh pallet. Albeit still looking a bit like Johnny Depp. But now with the dawn upon us, heaven can wait. You don't have to fear a Jack White planet, especially when the man who played on Beyoncé's 'Lemonade' and made James Bond songs with Alica Keys ('Another Way To Die' from Quantum Of Solace) is going on tribe's called quests with legends that turn in your ear. 'Hi-De-Ho'.
Spin magazine in an influential interview with the icon spun a story about a White Striped studio session that heard a pop legend a few doors over. Jack was so intrigued he came out of his box and headed towards the door. His knuckles just a finger tip away from rapping on the door when he thought, 'nah'. "Mariah Carey will never go for it." Now for your what could have beens as all we want for Christmas is this collaboration, White is not afraid to ask Q-Tip. Especially after providing instrumental backing to the inspired Tribe return album 'We Got It From Here...Thank You For Your Service'. And on 'Hi-De-Ho', Tip's ad-lib and hip-hop quotables are on point like all the time. Especially with a Cab Calloway introduction. I'm glad Jack dug his jive with The Abstract rapping, "You're the wave, you'rе the rave, the unanimous conclusion/Hurtin' real bad like Stevie Wonder with contusions/It's a guitar chuck comin' from Chuck Berry/Hi-de-high tones, Minnie Rip, Mariah Carey/Olajuwon post moves, LeBron or Embiid/Everybody got it in 'em, find yours and succeed." On fire even referencing Mariah. Singing along with Jack's "find your joy/feel your vibrations/On the highest plain". It's a great tip on an amazing album, whose title track asks us, "When the moon is above you/Does it tell you "I love you" by screaming?/Like when the sun starts to fall/And it's crushing the walls and the ceiling", on a top gun for this Maverick like Cruise finally taking flight this Summer May day. But 'Taking Me Back' to open proceedings on a rip roaring 'Blunderbuss', 'Lazaretto' and 'Over and Over and Over' and its classic Stripes era video in White blue off 'Boarding House Reach' really brings us right to it, this morning. "When I'm down on the floor/You'll see that no one will notice me/It's breaking my back/Breaking my back/When you drop the mail off to me/And make us both coffee/Are you taking it black?/Are you taking me back?" We are...and we ain't talking about the damn fine coffee.
Clocking in at 40 minutes exactly, no seconds out for his first of his twin peaks. Fear 'The White Raven' and its omens for your ball and biscuit no more, sugar. "A neutral peace comes from painted pieces/A brutal feast on the tainted beasts and/A white machine gun, a white machine gun/Baby blue grenade, a shade of kelly green machine gun," Jack's 'White Raven' calls. Did he just reference Machine Gun Kelly on this flying rocker? He is raven! So much so. 'Eosophobia' and its raw and ready reprise will scare and stir you like echoes. But before 'Dawn's' 'Dusk', 'Into The Twilight' will really take you into the woods like the creepy, cartoonish, amazing artwork of this album. To the "ba-da-ba's" of The Manhattan Transfer as William S. Borroughs warns us, "when you cut into the present, the future leaks out." Pray you pay heed before another dawn comes from the night darkest. On 'What's The Trick' Jack plays with "two gentlemen of elegant appearance' like Bradley Cooper in Guillermo del Toro's 'Nightmare Alley' noir. Button to button, the White Stripe, Raconteur under dead weather tells us about the two sides like fear, dawn and entry to heaven with 'That Was Then (This Is Now)'. Giving us a lyric to go that may be the line of our times, "when you're looking for love you've got no time to be patient." But before 'Heaven' gets hotter than Stevie this July, the wonder is previewed on the slow down double closer of 'Morning, Noon and Night' and the smoother than silk closer 'Shedding My Velvet' that crushes it whilst I wait for a Third Man record store here in Tokyo, one day and long for the London one after Nashville. Moving away from passive aggressive love that haunts ("Don't have time for martyrs, I don't have time for ghosts/No time for manipulations, what I want the most/Is more time for me and time for you/Is there any way I can sway you to stay for a minute or two?/Yeah/That's what I wanna do"). Hallowed in the name of making more sacred music with this moon night that we would even welcome him at the gates with a trilogy of albums these twelve months. Even when he sheds his blue velvet and his barbershop like suit jacket, we don't want him to shed any sound here to the cutting room floor of his prolific production like a rolling stone on his own songbook for the Motor City part of America. Taking us underground like Warhol pop art, never slipping on the banana, "can't you see/this is the real (he)?" After all, "it's better to illuminate, than merely to shine" and the blue dye is doing this like Japanese neon. All as the pearly lights lift us like a rapture before tomorrow morn. Fear not. Now you've made it through the dawn alive, you're about to enter heaven. TIM DAVID HARVEY.
Playlist Picks: 'Taking Me Back', 'Hi-De-Ho (Feat. Q-Tip)', 'Shedding My Velvet'.
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