Jack White: Lazaretto
Jack White: Lazaretto
A Lazaretto is a hospice for lepers, plague victims and the "diseased poor". Themes of quarantine, the asylum and ghosts recur throughout this, the second solo album from Jack White.
Recently divorced - and sounding angry, confused and horny - White has created an album that is inventive, intense and, oddly , a huge amount of fun. The former White Stripes man blurs genres, takes songs in unexpected directions and peppers tracks with extraordinary production flourishes.
By the fourth song on Lazaretto, White has treated listeners to funk, blues, ragtime piano, Gypsy jazz and, on the ballad Temporary Ground, Desire-era Dylan.
Crane your ear during I Think I Found the Culprit and you will hear the most soaring operatic backing vocal since Pink Floyd's The Great Gig in the Sky .
Lazaretto is an adventurous album laced with menace.
Thankfully, White has channelled his demons in Lazaretto to create one of the great break-up albums of recent years. - © James Hall, The Daily Telegraph
Neil Young: A Letter Home
After years bringing the pin-drop purity of studio-quality sound to digital downloads, Neil Young makes a covers album using a 1947 Voice-O-Graph vinyl recording booth.
Produced by Jack White, who occasionally adds a little piano to proceedings, this is about as close as you can get to listening in sepia.
Opening with a crackly address to his dead mother (updating her on climate change), this is a rattlebag of acoustic versions that plays the clever trick of making songs by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Everly Brothers and others sound older than they really are. - Helen Brown, ©The Daily Telegraph
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