Why can’t we be nicer to him?

[Video][Website]
[4.78]Rebecca Toennessen: I love Jack White with the force of a thousand fiery, slightly deranged suns but I often wish he’d stay inside his gaslamp-lit mansion surrounded by his taxidermy animals and never open his damn fool mouth again, except to sing songs like this. But, as he puts it, even God herself knows when I say nothing, I say everything. “Lazaretto” shrieks angrily, crunchy and slicky with a classic JWIII solo that admittedly isn’t groundbreaking but feels so much like coming home to me.
[9]

Crystal Leww: The funniest thing about this whole Jack White vs. The Black Keys debate is that it’s like debating between two terrible ripoffs of bluesy rock music. I have no desire to judge either for their authenticity; it’s perfectly fine for artists to reinterpret and reinvent, but it’s fucked up that Jack White is claiming ownership over a sound that isn’t his to claim. Further, White’s music is uninspired, like someone who read about the elements of bluesy rock in a textbook and made a song based on that. “Lazaretto” has that growly voice, a suspiciously well placed guitar solo, and some droning on about prisons, the masses, and ashes. There’s a god damn fiddle involved right when you’d expect it. It’s all gimmick, no substance.
[4]

Patrick St. Michel: Could have just bought a Rage Against The Machine shirt from Hot Topic.
[4]

Brad Shoup: He already wrote the worst Beastie Boys tribute, so why not bring it home for some Kid Rock love? He loves to talk about braggadocio like it’s his thesis subject, but his controlled freakiness is wearying; White’s been actualizing for two decades. I’m ready for textures, like from the swinging fiddle, or even the fadeout, where the delay-heavy nu-rock riff quickens and dissipates in the wash.
[5]

Alfred Soto: In which Jack White hears the Beastie Boys’ “Funky Boss” and likes it. A pity: a month ago I saw the title and thought he covered Lindstrøm and Todd Terje.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: It’s tempting, particularly as he follows the Pearl Jam route of monkishly disavowing his best pop instincts, to dismiss Jack White as a stodgy nostalgist who has mistaken pantomime for authenticity. But that’s not quite right; “Lazaretto” isn’t the meat-and-potatoes work of the traditionalist ascetic White would like us to imagine him to be. It’s stuffed with ideas, some of them good. His ice-splinter guitar-work on verse two channels Wes Borland at his more creative, and he interrupts those delicate accents with a hot and choked guitar solo that gasps with slit-throat violence. The middle eight burbles with CGI sci-fi flourishes, which less inspiringly, give way to a curiously out-of-place fiddle solo. It’s forward-thinking in a very 1970s way, convinced that rock and roll’s potential is limitless if it can only get big enough, and that all ideas get better when translated into the language of long-haired frontmen and blues-inherited boogie.
[3]

Anthony Easton: Jack White thinks he can save rock and roll, and like some Primitive Baptists, thinks that he can do that by time travelling to an ur-state. The problem with both Jack and the Baptists is twofold — the Holy Spirit and the spirit of rock and roll are continually renewing, and one can never return back to the womb. There might even be a third problem: rock and roll and Christianity are too strange to have a unified origin. When White is on — “Hardest Button to Button,” “Seven Nation Army,” and especially his cover of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” — his work is new, infused with history, but present with a prophetic renewal. When he is off — this — it becomes ossified in how it seeks purity.
[2]

Thomas Inskeep: I’m not generally inclined towards skronky guitar rock, which makes the joy I find in “Lazaretto” all the more surprising and, well, enjoyable. The White Stripes were for my money one of the most clever, and rocking, bands of the ’00s, and more so than anything I heard from Jack White’s first solo album this continues that march. This isn’t the pretentious “let me tell you all about reupholstering” White (Rolling Stone, you did him no favors); this is the White of It Might Get Loud, who just wants to shred. “Lazaretto” sounds for all the world like a record I imagine Bo Diddley would make in 2014: weird, like Sun Ra with a cigar-box guitarist and a hot-shit Nashville fiddler. And it’s better than that sounds.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Jack White is most likely a ridiculous asshole, which places him in a grand canonical tradition we can duly ignore. Half his performance is credible, the other half like a Jim Carrey impression. The title suggests all sorts of words I’d rather not hear Jack White sing (“bordello,” “libretto,” “ghetto”), but his throughline’s pretty standard, roguish picaresque bullshit that doesn’t embarrass him. Which all makes this sound pretty average, but “Lazaretto” scuzzes and overdrives its way past the [5] mark.
[6]