Today: Song titles that sound like lines from knock-knock jokes (not really).
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[6.00]
Alex Ostroff: It’s been five years since the last White Stripes album, and six or seven since I grew tired of Jack White’s shambolic bluesman schtick. His lyrics haven’t gotten any less mawkish, and that little woodwind countermelody feels too jaunty to fit in with the rest of ‘Love Interruption’. Still, this is unambitiously charming — or charmingly unambitious — and if he’s not doing anything particularly new, it’s suddenly good to hear Jack do an old thing well.
[6]
Pete Baran: As much as Jack White’s Luddite, valves-and-all world view annoys me intensely, there is no denying that he has his swamp blues rock stuff down pat. But is there a point where there is enough, a few White Stripes albums should cover you completely with what Jack is going to do for ever. “Love Interruption” adds little to the White canon except from being a a tightly coiled wisp of a song, which threatens to explode and then walks away politely, remembering to take its glass back to the bar.
[4]
Anthony Easton: From this point on, Jack White should be banned from doing ballads of any sort. Who would have thought he was capable of such sophistic milksoppery?
[3]
Brad Shoup: The interruption is a metatextual thing, surely; White promises us over the hills and far away, but delivers plateaus. The clarinet & Wurlitzer portend too much for his acoustic to end up the loudest instrument. If this is an exercise in denied gratification — a text of violence without a tune to match — then I’m just going to have to deploy my safeword.
[5]
Alfred Soto: The three-note electric piano hook sure is purty, and the circularity on which he builds the lyric evokes late Leonard Cohen, but an air of so-what suffocates the track.
[6]
Rebecca Toennessen: There will be no more White Stripes songs, apparently. I’m still in denial, but will take anything, be it Dead Weather or Raconteurs or solo stuff. I’ll pass on Insane Clown Posse, though.Now that Jack’s on his own officially, it’s time for ‘hanging out with Ravi Shankar’ i.e. working with various people. He’s chummed around with ICP and Modest Mouse, and in the past with an exhaustive list including Loretta Lynn, Adele, the Stones and his own supergroups. I want to hear this within context of the album (as always) but I love Jack’s gentle growling of fairly dodgy lyrics as it builds up into a brilliant singalong-song and lets us down smiling.
[9]
John Seroff: Jack and Meg had a real knack for simple blues rock with legs; “We’re Going To Be Friends” has no right to sound so strong and fresh ten years later, yet there it is. “Love Interruption” is made in much the same mode: a major minor, without frills but also without fat. White has, without much fanfare, become one of America’s best bluesmen and strongest songwriters. Who would’ve guessed?
[7]
Sally O’Rourke: Like the bass clarinet motif pulsing through it, “Love Interruption” starts off mellow but soon gets under your skin. The minimalist backdrop seems sedate, but the lack of drums and guitar riffs leaves you anchorless, adrift and uncertain about the song’s headed. The twin vocals are equally inscrutable. On the one hand, there’s Jack rattling off a list of the troubles that love’s caused him. The more he howls, though, the more you suspect he aches for a passion so intense that it could knife him in the stomach and leave him to die. On the other, there’s Ruby Amanfu, her raspy vibrato channeling the busted-from-raising-hell vocals of recent Wanda Jackson, sounding for all the world like someone relishing the thought of being disrupted, corrupted and interrupted.
[9]
Jer Fairall: An awesomely brutal lyric, but it sounds like a demo for something that could really kick ass in a later, fuller incarnation so long as it keeps Ruby Amanfu’s compellingly unsteady vocal performance. Oh, and lose the guy doing the bad Robert Plant impression.
[5]