Not that it hasn’t been appreciated, but to better appreciate Jack White’s compositional simplicity as an artist – a virtue that complements his eccentricity, which we wrote about a few months ago – it is enough to consider the following: once comparing an analog recording with a digital one, an American said that he prefers the former “for what it makes you do”, while the latter gives you “all these options to change your sound, but most of them are not good for the artist” On another occasion, in the Davis Guggenheim documentary ” Can Get Louder” (2008) – White demonstrated the power of a guitar he built himself from a plank, a Coke bottle, a string and an electromagnet and when asked one day what his favorite track was, he replied “Grinnin’ in Your Face”, which consists of a raw a cappella rendition of old blues ouzo player Sean House and a few rhythmic claps.

Under normal circumstances, the above would be sufficient to introduce White’s latest recording, Entering Heaven Alive: the American’s fifth solo album, as opposed to its “twin” Fear of the Dawn, which came out last April and sounded like a raging and unstoppable electrical storm. , it really seems to be characterized by that simplicity, which is based on the dominance of acoustic guitar and piano – after all, White himself presented two albums as a double, contrapuntal project, the first of which roughly represented the terrible demons of darkness and the second, sweet angels of light. But already from the first listen, it becomes clear that, despite the composer’s claims, “Entering Heaven Alive” is something more than a calm and contemplative equivalent of its paranoid predecessor: tracks such as “All Along the Way”, “I’ ve Got You Surrounded (With My Love)”, “If I Die Tomorrow”, “Love Is Selfish”, and “A Madman from Manhattan” usually start out as folk rock goals, fast-paced pop tunes or acoustic ballads, but sometimes take paths to funk, dub, jazz or the addition of some unexpected musical instrument, confirming in each case the unpredictable temperament of their creator.

Which, in any case, ends here with simplicity and synthetic immediacy. This can be seen in the final track “Entering Heaven Alive”, “Taking Me Back (Gently)”, which is nothing more than an acoustic version of the previous album’s opening (and furious and unstoppable) track “Fear of the Dawn’: deafening the guitars have now been replaced with a playful gypsy violin inviting you to put down your beer and get up to dance with your girlfriend. Somehow, the insane Jack White worked his magic again: he tamed the electric beast he set free at the very beginning, once again confirming that after years with the White Stripes, he too has a tender side.

B side

Fans of Joy Division and Ian Curtis have drawn backlash over the cover of an iconic mural of the artist’s face in Manchester from a promotion for rapper H’s new album. The latter, however, was quick to clarify that he did not know where the specific (giant) poster would be placed, while promising that all necessary actions would be taken to restore “disrespect for a local hero like Jan”, as is typical for him. wrote.