‘Boarding House Reach’ is easily one of the most layered and compelling releases of 2018, which furthers White’s legacy as one of the few remaining mavericks in music.
Jack White's Boarding House Reach is his most unorthodox stroke of genius since going solo.
In many ways, this is as radical, experimental and mind-expanding of a pop album as you’re likely to hear anytime soon, let alone by a festival headlining artist.
Boarding House Reach may be a hard pill to swallow, but it's rarely boring and without a doubt the most far-reaching, experimental collection of songs in White's ample discography.
Boarding House Reach is a firm fuck you to complacent, screen-staring, Trump-submitting America, its social media–based icons and neatly-packaged pop songs about cars and pills. It’s esoteric and unsettling, because he’s done trying to reason with us.
There's nothing here likely to be adopted as a stadium chant, but in its tethered imagination, Boarding House Reach is the most surprising and eccentric record White's made.
This record, while not entirely “bizarre,” is either adventurously or confusedly all over the place (most likely the former). But wouldn’t you know—White actually sounds like he’s having a blast not having to be his usual self.
Boarding House Reach is easily his most “produced” album, though it’s far from a smooth listening experience.
There is ultimately something sketchy about Boarding House Reach, pulling in so many directions that it suggests rough drafts for more fully formed work to come. But for all that, there are so many rich ingredients in the mix, even misophones should find something to soothe their troubled ears.
Boarding House Reach is just crazy enough to make it work—and with this as his point of departure, it’s now refreshingly impossible to predict where White will go next.
This is no album of the year contender, nor will it rank too highly on White's saggish discography. Instead, it's thirteen songs of creative madness. Jack White may not be as relevant as he once was, but his ambition is still just as strong, twenty years on.
Even in the earliest days of the White Stripes, White limited his aural palette with deliberate zeal, a practice he sustained through the Stripes as well as his first two solo albums. Boarding House Reach is where he expands his horizons and that discipline begins to fracture, and quite intentionally so.
Not only are these the strangest songs White has ever written, he's now got the eclectic instrumentation to match. These 13 tracks feature a synth-heavy sonic palette and freewheeling structures that White stitched together from extended studio jams, resulting in a postmodern mashup of vintage and futuristic.
White has called Boarding House Reach “bizarre.” But it’s messier than it is bizarre.
Boarding House Reach is… weird. White’s third solo album is ambitious, fuzzy, and futuristic but it’s not inherently bad, just weird. It’s certainly not an album for the past and it’s not one that fits exactly in the present.
With his third solo LP, Jack White hits the nail on the head just as often as he misses it spectacularly on a haphazard record.
You can’t escape the feeling it’s all rather like a fairground ride taken after too much fizzy pop and a long queue.
Boarding House Reach is, by no means a great album, but it’s certainly an album with some great moments. It is a bold experiment, and as long as Jack White has the will and the temperament to try new things, there’s sure to be something worth listening to.
Boarding House Reach is an anomaly. One moment is full of emotion, passion and cutting-edge music. The next moment you’re asking what the hell you just listened to.
A postmodern assault of freaked-out sonic ataxia, it's messy, wildly uneven, and at times even close to unlistenable, but its sheer audacity makes it utterly intriguing.
Boarding House Reach resembles less a coherent album than a miscellany of ideas – or a collection of B-sides, with all the good and bad that entails.
Of all the bad records from popular artists in the past few years, Everything Now, Painting With, Songs of Innocence, Jack White has created the best kind of bad record, one that is packed full of ideas like a children’s book that got struck by lightning. Whether you love or hate Boarding House Reach, one thing is obvious, it is not boring.
On Boarding House Reach, Jack White has given himself free reign to do whatever he wants. But like a child let loose in a candy store, he has eaten way more than his fill and vomited all over the floor.
More concerning ... given White’s fondness for conceptual heft, is how lightweight it is. So preoccupied he seems with how he could make an album this strangely self-absorbed, he never stopped to wonder if he should.
On Boarding House Reach he sounds like he’s desperately trying to prove how clever he is to his listeners, frankly, you wish he’d just write a few more decent songs first because this record is often so frantic, that all of the songs become a blur with very few standouts. Listening to it just leaves me wanting to reach for the pain killers.
Boarding House Reach? more like... BORING HOUSE REACH!!! HAHAHaaaaa
Edit: Original Score 71. I have good days with this album and bad days. It’s overall an extremely coherent experience that works in a very avant-garde way. I kinda like it
Who'd have though we'd live to see a day when Jack Black makes better music than Jack White? What a time to be alive.
LONG FORM REVIEW:
“Rock is dead.” A phrase that is all too often thrown around.
In the past 30 years, rock has steadily declined in prominence, with adult-alternative bands, like Train and Maroon 5, and arena rock/electro-pop fusion bands, such as Coldplay and Imagine Dragons, continuing to water down the once highly name of rock music. While many have hailed traditionalist bands such as Greta Van Fleet (and Tame Impala, to a certain extent) as the 'saviors of rock,' I believe ... read more
Listened to this one not expecting a rock album, because I wondered if that was my issue. I did like it more, but I still find that his writing is most interesting by far when it comes to rock.
Gen Z's Remain In Light. Amazingly diverse and avant-garde in a way where it keeps you interested during the whole album. Its almost confusing with all the experimentation it does.
1 | Connected By Love 4:37 | 86 |
2 | Why Walk a Dog? 2:29 | 79 |
3 | Corporation 5:39 | 89 |
4 | Abulia and Akrasia 1:28 | 70 |
5 | Hypermisophoniac 3:34 | 79 |
6 | Ice Station Zebra 3:59 | 85 |
7 | Over and Over and Over 3:36 | 96 |
8 | Everything You've Ever Learned 2:13 | 77 |
9 | Respect Commander 4:33 | 85 |
10 | Ezmerelda Steals the Show 1:42 | 62 |
11 | Get In the Mind Shaft 4:13 | 77 |
12 | What's Done is Done 2:54 | 78 |
13 | Humoresque 3:10 | 77 |
#9 | / | Yahoo Music |
#12 | / | The Needle Drop |
#16 | / | Fopp |
#20 | / | Uncut |
#28 | / | Gigwise |
#34 | / | MondoSonoro |
#50 | / | NME |
#73 | / | MOJO |