Local Music Blog: Jack White is Back With a Colorful Album

Sorry for the week off folks, but coaching a team through a Rockford soccer tournament was quite the all-encompassing experience. Not only that, but we only had one reasonable new release this week so we’ll just go ahead and combine the April 17 and April 24 titles.

Whenever you pick up anything by Loudon Wainwright III (or his son Rufus for that matter), it’s a real hit or miss proposition. There’s no middle ground. It’s either gonna be really good or it’s gonna be really bad.

On one hand, this is the man who penned two of my favorite songs, Dead Skunk and The Swimming Song. C’mon! Who could forget these lyrics:

This summer I went swimming,
This summer I might have drowned
But I held my breath and I kicked my feet
And I moved my arms around

The wit, the humor and the melody are all great.

But when he engages in a practice my esteemed Patch editor likes to call “navel gazing,” it almost always leads to disaster. And this, his 22nd album, is a disaster.

Older Than My Old Man Now is supposed to be an attempt to reconcile the lifelong effect of his father’s early death with the prospect of his own mortality, but it just doesn’t work. It’s not that the music itself is bad, but blinder fed introspection is generally pretty boring to anyone other than the introspectee.

And at nearly an hour, it drones on and on and on and on and on and on. In fact, it almost cured me of my love for long albums.

Normally, Wainwright overcomes his maudlin tendencies with his wonderful sense of humor, but even a duet with Dame Mae Edna called I Remember Sex falls completely flat. His spoken word soliloquies are painful and the song with son Rufus is even worse.

Pink Floyd knew how to do it. It took more than two decades for me to realize that most of their albums centered around band mate Syd Barrrett’s demise. But now I truly understand my editor’s warning. Avoid this one folks.

On to Train!

Though they’re a band the cool people love to hate, Cab is one of the best songs ever written, Drops of Jupiter wasn’t bad and Hey, Soul Sister was kinda catchy. They can make some amazing music when they put their minds to it.

So what can I say about California 37, their seventh studio effort? It’s a Train album! It’s got the obligatory singles, Drive By and This’ll Be My Year, that neither disappoint nor excite.

Obviously, buy it if you’re a fan.

Neon Trees is a Provo, Utah, quartet that burst on the scene with 2010’s Habits, has certainly figured out how to avoid that dreaded sophomore jinx. In fact, Picture Show may well be top 25 album material.

Are they power pop? Alternative? New wave? Rock? Yes! And it’s within that categorical quandary that lies the reason I love this band so much. Without making the mistake of being M. Ward all over the map, you can’t peg them to any specific genre which tends to baffle the average critic.

The tracks Everybody Talks and Mad Love are certainly destined for my iPod and every time I listen to this album (five times so far) it fires me up and puts me in a good mood. That’s always a good sign. I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I highly recommend Picture Show.

After he finished messing around with the mediocre Raconteurs and made some reasonable Dead Weather music, former White Stripe Jack White finally got down to business with his first solo album, Blunderbuss.

The problem we have here is there’s nothing the now defunct White Stripes did that didn’t knock my socks off. We’re talking some of the best rock albums of this century. So it’s difficult to approach anything Mr. White does without the bar already being set to amazingly lofty heights.

Thankfully, while Blunderbuss ain’t White Stripes, this time, Mr. White does not disappoint. It took a couple of listens, but this is an amazing album and, as we speak, I’m down on my knees begging the music muse that it won’t be a one time thing.

Though there are many disparate influences at work here – rock, blues, country, jazz, folk, jazz, and classical – in the end, it’s all Jack White and it all works. A whole lot of other folks are going to have to do some really amazing work to push this one out of my top 25.

Jack! What took you so long to do this?

Blunderbuss is about as asymptotic as it gets to being a must have without quite getting there. But since I firmly believe we should give this amazing artist an opportunity to supersede himself next time, we’ll go with a high-end highly recommended rating.

Next week we have new ones from Father John Misty, which is basically the moniker for former Fleet Foxes drummer J. Tillman, and Gravenhurst, one of my favorite mood music bands, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, my current favorite musical group name and some previously unreleased George Harrison

Until then, you’ll probably find me running while I sing Everybody Talks far too loudly and horribly out of tune.