Jack White’s Boarding House Reach is lifeless and muddled

Jack White, to his credit, seems keen not to stagnate. It’s easy enough for rock stars to slip into complacent cycles at a certain point in their careers, grinding out indistinct albums on repeat with respectable sales guaranteed from an ever-loyal fanbase. White, however, interviewed by Rolling Stone in the lead-up to his new album Boarding House Reach, revealed his ambitious mission statement to “take punk, hip-hop and rock & roll, and funnel it all into a 2018 time capsule”. Whether or not that sounds appealing, one must at least concede that White seems to be trying to keep things interesting. It’s a shame then, that what experimentation there is on his latest product manages to be so garish and so tedious at the same time.

Boarding House Reach often sounds like if you asked somebody to pick up a synthesizer for the first time and write an album of Queen pastiches; rarely do the electronic embellishments littered throughout contribute much of value, primarily feeling like distractions from weak songwriting. ‘Hypermisophoniac’ is one such exercise in tastelessness, inserting vocal processing and a grating chiptune whirr into sloppy, lacklustre blues, while the pulsing bass drone on ‘Connected by Love’ sounds like a keyboard preset, a dismal foundation to an uninspired opening number. There are interesting sounds here and there, usually in the moments when White manages to wring some engaging timbres out of his guitar, such as on ‘Why Walk a Dog?’; however, in most of these cases it is not enough to justify venturing into what is otherwise a lifeless dud of a track. The drum machines that tick along weakly in the background of a handful of these songs would at least emphasise the thump of their acoustic counterparts if it were not for the album’s poor production, which flattens the live percussion into musical cardboard.

Too often do these songs fail to channel White’s dramatic flair into genuinely exciting compositions

As for White’s ambitious genre soup, the most obvious gesture towards hip-hop is the disastrous ‘Ice Station Zebra’, wherein he raps nonsense over a chaotic instrumental like a discount Beastie Boy; ‘Corporation’, meanwhile, is a funk-flavoured slog that has no business being nearly 6 minutes long. Too often do these songs fail to channel White’s dramatic flair into genuinely exciting compositions; ‘Over and Over and Over’, for example, is a clumsy exercise in bombast that boasts an uninspired riff and ludicrous backing vocals, but virtually no meaningful development. ‘Respect Commander’ amounts to an overall highlight, propelled by kinetic drumming, searing riffs and peculiar orchestral hits, although it conspicuously fails to stick the landing by dragging itself on for a half-minute past the logical ending point.

The album’s most effective moments are tucked away at the very end. ‘What’s Done is Done’ is a pleasant, bluesy duet that incorporates electronics more effectively than any other song in the tracklist, mostly by not beating you over the head with them. Closing track ‘Humoresque’ meanwhile, is an interpretation of a manuscript written by Al Capone in the 1920s, borrowing musically from Dvorák; White’s wispy crooning eventually gives way to an impressionistic fog of piano, cymbals and guitar that is subtler and prettier than one may have thought this album capable of.

No amount of yelping, distortion or electronic gimmickry can compensate for the uninspired core of Boarding House Reach

The failure of the album, ultimately, is twofold. At times, it is an overcalculated, lifeless attempt to rekindle the kind of rock-n-roll passion that distinguished Jack White in the first place. When it is not remaining within this anaemic comfort zone, the album’s gestures towards experimentation are so messy, so half-hearted, and so poorly-conceived that White’s vision of stylistic synthesis quickly disintegrates into monotony. No amount of yelping, distortion or electronic gimmickry can compensate for the uninspired core of Boarding House Reach. If White is trying to remain on the cutting edge of rock music, then he needs to try harder.