Jack White - No Name

When this record appeared both impromptu and incognito, a 12” smuggled in alongside unsuspecting customers’ purchases from his Third Man Records empire, word spread that this un-labelled record – now given the suitable moniker of ‘No Name’ and officially released under Jack White’s own – was ‘like a new White Stripes album’. 

This, as one might have imagined once the initial fuss died down, turned out to be somewhat of an exaggeration; there’s as much of a thread from anything else the multi – hyphenate has done since to pin-point, such as the melodic nature of opener ‘Old Scratch Blues’ presenting a beefier Raconteurs, perhaps, or the hip hop beat underpinning his vocal delivery on ‘Archbishop Harold Holmes’ nodding to both 2022’s ‘Fear of the Dawn’ and 2018’s ‘Boarding House Reach’. <![CDATA[Instead, ‘No Name’ is closer to Jack presenting his younger self with everything he’s learned since – a reset of sorts. It’s minimalist – a return, perhaps, of his famed ‘rule of three’ which dictated the sonic limits of the White Stripes – but less dogmatic. This could just as easily be ascribed to two decades’ worth of built confidence as to a relaxation of his self-imposed restrictions, of course, but the juxtaposition of sounds from his early back catalogue alongside more recent formulae strongly suggest the former. 

Take ‘It’s Rough On Rats (If You’re Asking)’: its riff-as-hook and ever-so-slightly tardy drum beat is as euphoric as it is familiar, but there’s a funky element on show too. The garage rock of de facto single ‘That’s How I’m Feeling’ pulses, but with a swagger. There’s the fluidity of ‘What’s The Rumpus?’, the deranged laughter of ‘Morning At Midnight’, and the twangy refrain of ‘Underground’ that lands somewhere at the mid-way point between hoedown and wig-out yet somehow never escapes into itself. The contrast is more direct still with the sonic fuzz of rollicking garage punk number ‘Bombing Out’ against the comparative clarity of what surrounds it, and the use of “girl” as repeated punctuation in sprawling, epic closer ‘Terminal Archenemy Endling’ that echoes ‘White Blood Cells’ track ‘I Can’t Wait’. A re-embrace of earlier sounds, then, that’s simultaneously no rejection of anything that’s followed, it’s a move made only smarter by an understated release method that carefully side-steps any suggestion of the latter. There’s joy in its familiarity, but exhilaration in the lightness of its delivery – even when the music itself gets heavy.