Lazaretto

An album that’s otherwise so successful at distilling a singular vision into something both gut-punching and sonically intriguing.

White's aesthetic, as always, is grounded in the immediate and the visceral, and Lazaretto rocks. [No. 111, p.60]

Our six-string savior not only makes his guitar do things that will have you forgetting that Page and Plant are never to take to a stage together again; he is also keen to remind us in just whose hands now rests that Hammer of the Gods.

A confident, brash, inventive collection featuring songs that lock into the psyche after only a few listens, the White-produced creation is lyrically and musically challenging and filled with many fresh avenues of exploration, even as it nods to key tones and ideas from throughout the history of pre-rap American music.

So while Lazaretto may sometimes appear to be a more nakedly emotional collection of songs than we've come to expect from its creator, the contents also rate among his wittiest and his wildest efforts to date. [Jul 2014, p.63]

Expansive cross-pollination at its finest, Lazaretto's dizzying Pandora's box of funk, blues, and hillbilly soul shakes and bakes enough to require a shrink-wrapped bottle of Dramamine.

The songs are exciting, effortlessly creative and full of risk-taking, but White taps into the vein of classic rock just enough to filter all of his weird extrapolations so that they’re comprehensible for his audience.

It's vibrant and soulful, but undercut with a darkness that's hinted just enough to haunt these songs. [28 Jun 2014, p.54]

At a couple of number shorter than its predecessor, Lazaretto packs a hell of a punch. [Jul 2014, p.84]

Sure, there’s a mildly preposterous, posturing axe-warrior in there, but it’s tempered, often joyously, with a self-mocking feminine side here, and makes for some of his most carefree but considered music in a very long time.

Like Willy Wonka, Jack White is a strange, dramatic and otherworldly figure. Lazaretto amplifies all these character traits to electrifying effect. [Jul 2014, p.106]

While Lazaretto occasionally hints at some of the excesses of the producer/songwriter genre, what's undeniable is the talent on display.

What makes it a better, richer work is how it simultaneously holds every side of White, existing at the crossroads where modernity, tradition, hard work, and inspiration all meet.

Lazaretto [is] literally a house of blues (the title is Italian for a lepers' hospital), with each room outfitted according to White's mood and trials.

The band that has most closely followed his lead--the Black Keys--sticks to conventional takes on American genres, but White treats them with something fresher: a sense of menace.

This feels like a deeper record than its predecessor, 2012’s well-received Blunderbuss, not as pretty but certainly sharper and more elegantly formed, something that’s reflected in the respective titles.

Lazaretto, named after a place of quarantine for sailors, hurtles between moods and tempos, often within the same song.

At times, despite the fact that this is his 12th collection of compositions, it’s often as if Lazaretto is Jack White at his most vulnerable.

Lazaretto is perhaps the most conventionally made of White’s back catalogue. And for an artist as brilliantly unconventional as he, could prove itself more of a test than any of its predecessors. A test passed with flying colours (or at least various shades of blue).

Lazaretto sounds dense, to the point of occasionally seeming cluttered and a little messy--the things that are good about Lazaretto are pretty much the same things that are good about every album White has made.

Lazaretto finds him simultaneously unbridled as a player, yet meticulous as both mad scientist and personal diarist.

Lazaretto is an album of singles--it’s also a pretty revelatory record of healing and perseverance for White--that bounds rapidly through America’s South from the ’50s-’70s. It’s another great side to White, and another feather to stick in his pretty feathery cap.

Coming two years after his debut ‘Blunderbuss’, a vitriol-filled purge that dropped in the wake of White’s divorce, Lazaretto does sound like a transitional step.

On Lazaretto, White rummages through his cart and emerges with fiddles, organs, slide guitars, and fuzz boxes powered by hand-cranked generators. And is that a leftover plate of Ennio Morricone's Western spaghetti? Indeed, it is, and if it all adds up to a better album than his debut, "Blunderbuss."

It's bold, but Lazaretto argues that White's legacy may still be intact if he plans on waiting several more years for the third act.

Despite Jack White's claims that each song is separate due to the archive nature of his source material Lazaretto is a cohesive entity made distinct by the range of styles and structural arrangements on individual tracks.

Lazaretto will likely have little impact on his legacy one way or the other, but it’s a solid addition to his catalogue.

White's best songs combine his songwriting chops with his boundless charisma, and Lazaretto has both in spades--the swaggeringly funky ''Three Women'' and the strutting title track are instant classics. But so far, his solo work lacks the bracing agitation that fueled past projects.

It’s an almost self-consciously busy-minded album, chockablock with ideas and sounds, all colliding violently and sometimes brutally.

The songs that make up Lazaretto are the most diverse on a White album since Get Behind Me Satan, and even more impressively, the songs themselves could stand alongside those on Icky Thump and Consolers of the Lonely thanks to the wonderful arrangements.... Of course, Lazaretto, for all the growth it shows from Blunderbuss, could never be as good as the work that White rattled off from roughly 2000’s De Stijl to 2005’s Get Behind Me Satan.

Songs don’t unfold in expected structures; they erupt, recoil, and then ride some jagged riff into another direction entirely.

When one pushes past the muckraking and puts Lazaretto on, all the silliness fades away. This is an exceptional rock album by a guy who really is the kind of rock star he’s aiming to be.

Sometimes it’s tightly argumentative, weirdly superstructured, assertive in not wanting to be understood too easily. Sometimes it relaxes into pre-existing Americana hyphenates--blues-rock, country-rock, energies closer to what certain adult listeners hold up as “real music.” The less real Mr. White is, the better he sounds.

A varied album that lacks any monster riffs like the ones White used to write for The White Stripes, but includes enough intrigue, originality and plain weirdness to delight and, in some places, appal.

Lazaretto pushes even further in its presentation of strange, misshapen song structures, coming off as kaleidoscopically fragmentary and incendiary.

Lazaretto will no doubt be heavily scrutinized by critics and celebrated by hardcore fans, but love it or hate it, nobody can call this stuff "watered-down."

Ultimately, without the abundance of the fitful, electrified abandon that permeated White’s past records--plus the fact that this album is clearly just another tiny sliver of the lexicon that may someday reveal his true scheme--some fans may feel moored on a lazaretto of dissatisfaction. Yet in the meantime, at the very least, Lazaretto is a damn catchy segue spot to await the arrival of the next intricate puzzle piece.

As an 11-song, 39-minute distillation of his fascination, Lazaretto works more or less as well as 2012′s Blunderbuss, his solo debut.