“DD Review: Jack White – No Name.”

Score: 7/10

I should have known, the whole time: I was Tantalus. I looked at this new Jack White album, the title, the cover, the song titles, and thought, oh God, yup, the girl broke up with him. And then he cloaks the opener “Old Scratch Blues” in so much groove and coolness — splitting time between old White Stripes and John Spencer Blues Explosion — that I can’t even for the life of me follow what he’s saying when it comes to girls.

I peeped the title “It’s Rough on Rats (If You’re Asking)” when I was first looking at the album and could only laugh at the deep sort of anguish that must have come with the construction of that project. It’s a relief, then, I guess, on an emotional level, to find this album pretty much an adventure in entry-level Guitar Hero. He’s not trying to DO anything that doesn’t come naturally, to him, in other words, and this LP might even win some young fans who are unfamiliar with Nirvana, or missed the initial wave of that, and want their ears to bleed a little bit.

It’s amazing, then, too, to hear when “It’s Rough on Rats (If You’re Asking)” has by far the most interesting guitar riff on the album up to this point, steeping itself in this amazing, treble-y sound, in all its grunge-y glory, for a result that has no choice but to strike you as soulful. Things come to a head poignantly at the end, too, and by this point it should be apparent to the precocious listener that he’s mad at the WORLD, probably not in the least part for its penchant for putting his music online for free streaming. I mean, you had to think that elephant in the room would rear its head at some point.

This theme of frustration at the economic infrastructure of his own business becomes even more apparent when, by about midway-through, you realize that, like Entering Heaven Alive, No Name is actually meant as a concept album. He’s not really doing, ingenuously, what he feels, on a musical level. A lot of the most watered-down tunes on Entering Heaven Alive, and the ill-conceived ones that attempted to adhere to arcane genre, were the “love” songs, leaving their inclusion as logically the most staunchly based on artist guile. Here, then, conversely, we have an adamantly “rock” album, and one nowhere near as good as his prior album, and another sign that, contrary to what it initially seemed, he’s not really as heartbroken about that break-up as would have been logically yielded by the a posteriori subject matter of Entering Heaven Alive.

So there are some amusing ideas on No Name, no question. But let’s be honest: this isn’t going to be any kind of actual meal ticket for Jack White. The emotional centerpiece “Tonight (Was a Long Time Ago)”; while resting on some cool titular irony and expedited structure, wields a sound that’s way too played-out, at this point. I’m not sure if White thinks it’s still the garage-rock revival of the early 2000s, but we’re not starved on a diet of Puddle of Mudd and Staind like we were during the precursor period to that. He’s going to have to reinvent himself on a sonic level, in the near future, in order to revive his solo career, which might, granted, at this point, just be hurt by over-contribution and the accompanying cheapening of the meaningful work he has accomplished therein.

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