The Albums That Matter: Boarding House Reach

Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE.

 

Boarding House Reach

Jack White

2018

 

Though Wikipedia states that Boarding House Reach received "generally favorable reviews," for some reason I remember it getting shit on at the time for being "too weird." Maybe I'm letting Pitchfork's panning have too much influence on my memory. In any case, I am here to defend Boarding House Reach from those P4K naysayers and anyone else who doesn't "get" Jack White's most recent solo album. Because that's what we're here for, right? This is an "album that matters." If I didn't find value in it, then I wouldn't be here writing about it.

To be fair, a lot of Boarding House Reach is, indeed, weird as fuck. At least in the context of Jack White's extended discography, anyway. There's always—since the dawn of the White Stripes—been talk of White being a "rock 'n' roll purist," or however you want to describe it, and yet here he is on a solo album, making computer noises, using autotune, reading spoken-word poems over gentle guitar strumming, piecing together seemingly disparate sounds into a collage. This isn't the Jack White you knew.

And that was too much for some people, and I get that. Maybe by the time you get to "Get in the Mind Shaft" and you're listening to four-plus minutes of Flaming Lips-style space synths and indecipherable robot voices, maybe your patience could wear thin. I wouldn't blame you.

I'll say this, though: Jack White, throughout all the new and wacky shit he throws at the wall on this album, never really loses the groove. These might not be the three-minute garage rock tunes he is mostly known for, but you can still, with very few exceptions, nod your head along to all of it. I don't have proof of this, but I have to imagine that White was listening to shit like the Meters while creating this album, or like any classic "funk" band like the Meters, the ones that rarely knocks your socks off, but always keeps locked into that groove.

A song like "Corporation" is, for instance, not like anything Jack White has done before. It's loose and ragged, it features a lot of nonsense yelling as if through a bullhorn, and plenty of conga, and there's not really a "melody" to speak of. But the rhythm hooks you anyway. Or, like "Respect Commander." You'd be forgiven if you felt this song bleeds together with some other songs around it, but you cannot deny that it's a steady groove that keeps you invested.

There's enough here to keep me satisfied that I'm more than willing to forgive the missteps (and there are a few). Like, give me those Icky Thump-style solos from "Connected by Love" all fucking day, and I'll suffer later in the album through less than two minutes of a stupid country western voice over performed by Jack White doing a terrible Woody Harrelson impression. White might try to do some weak tea imitation of rapping on "Ice Station Zebra," but the classic guitar ripper "Over and Over and Over" is coming up next, don't worry.

I wrote in my Help Us Stranger review in 2019 that I enjoyed the Raconteurs' newest album because it sounded like Jack White was allowing himself to be freed from his self-imposed constraints and just have fun. I think there's more meat on that bone of an idea if we apply it to Boarding House Reach. Not that this is necessarily as "fun" as a Raconteurs outing, but it's still fascinating to me, maybe more than any other White release, and that is because he is clearly fucking around and doing whatever he wants during a lot of this album's runtime.

That's really the main reason why I like Boarding House Reach. I find it pretty interesting that Jack White is ostensibly showing his true self here, and there's almost this impulse to recoil a little bit. I feel like White gets his balls busted for being too uptight and too serious sometimes, and then he goes ahead and releases some gonzo art house rock thing, and not everyone liked it, and then at a certain point it's like what the fuck do you people want?

Or you could look at it another way. You might choose to see Boarding House Reach as Jack White using "weirdness" as a shield against some other type of criticism or obstacle. E.g. maybe White was feeling pressure to release another album of certified guitar-driven classic-rock-style bangers, and he just couldn't do it, and instead of succumbing to writer's block, he instead just slapdashed a weirdo creature of an album and released it. No one can call it weird because no one can deny that that was the point.

 

I feel like I kind of do that too sometimes. If I feel like a blog post isn't really coming together like I wanted it to, I'll purposefully allow it to go completely off the rails, maybe lampshade the fact that it did, and acknowledge that this was a dumb thing that I did and that I'm going to publish it anyway—all of this is a defense mechanism against anyone pointing out that I could do better. I don't have to do better if I choose not to.

 

And so I do feel a weird affinity towards albums that I interpret as a similar defense mechanism. Not so much artists who have always been weird, but artists who have clearly turned toward the weird for this particular project. Clearly Jack White has been more successful, and much more coherent, in basically every album he's ever released, under any banner. But that's what makes Boarding House Reach special to me—not that it's better, but that it's different, in a particular way that captures my attention. Until White releases his next solo album, that's going to have to be good enough.

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If this album sounds interesting, try this song: "Hypermisophoniac"

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Stray Observations

• Let's see what I didn't talk about already. Oh, how about the second song, "Why Walk a Dog?" Interesting song! It's got a sort of slinky organ rhythm. It's also interesting because I can relate to the impulse to question why anyone would want a pet (he calls it "a cure for you to stop being bored," which is funny).
• I don't really know what to make of the penultimate country duet track, "What's Done Is Done." It's a song about White feeling so bored with himself that he's gonna buy a gun and kill himself. Hopefully creating Boarding House Reach helped him find some excitement in his life.
• That's Esther Rose on the duet, by the way. Her 2019 album You Made It This Far was quite fun, and hopefully by the time you are reading this I'll have dug into her new album How Many Times.
• Previously on the Blog #1: A few other people reviewed the Raconteurs' album a couple years ago, so check out the Record Club archives and Ctrl+F "Help Us Stranger" or whatever. I also mentioned Jack White's solo work that I wasn't interested listening to in a proto-Record Club post in 2016.
• Previously on the Blog #2: If there is an album covered by The Albums That Matter that we could compare Boarding House Reach's weirdness too, I'd go with ...And Star Power. Foxygen is a little weirder than Jack White in general, but they really brought the freaky-deaky to their sophomore album, and I appreciated it way more than critics did.
• Previously on the Blog #3: If you want examples of blog posts that I "purposefully allowed to go completely off the rails," then I can think of a couple off the top of my head. There was a weird The Night That We... about a grade school romance, a Record Club review that ended with Miley Cyrus speaking to the audience directly. I dunno, there's plenty of shit like that. I'm just trying to say that I get it, Jack.
• The drums on "Respect Commander" are pretty busy, and that got me thinking about the White Stripes. Like, this is a very un-Meg-White-ish drum beat, and I wonder if Jack White purposefully stays away from anything that might sound like Classic Meg on purpose, or what.
• I always remember being fascinated with the Elephant liner notes and how they claimed that "no computers were used in the making of this album," or something to that effect. Jack White truly has always been a Luddite. I think there's a time and a place for it, and I'm glad that White clearly didn't worry about such restrictions while making Boarding House Reach.
• ALBUM TITLE: I didn't know this until today, but "boarding house reach" is a real term for when you make a rude reach across a dinner table to grab something. Who knew! (And who knows why this was the phrase that was chosen to title the album!)
• ALBUM COVER: Kinda weird futuristic picture of a female(?) with a cloud for hair. I don't get it. According to Wikipedia, there was an alternate cover for the release of the "Third Man Records Vault vinyl edition." This one is a little better, and still futuristic looking. Both fit the sound decently, in my opinion.
• CHARTS: Wow, I didn't know this, but Boarding House Reach was #1 on the Billboard 200. Name recognition, baby! He knocked shitbag abuser and criminal and now-murdered XXXTentacion out of the top position.
• CHARTS #2: But he didn't even sniff the Billboard Hot 100 with this album, which I guess is not surprising. What is surprising is that Jack White has only had two appearances on the Hot 100 at all, ever, in history. He peaked at #81 with Alicia Keys for a Bond theme in '08, and he peaked at #28 for that Beyoncé Lemonade feature. Kind of fucking wild that that is literally it for the guy!
• I remember reading Steve Hyden's review of this album and appreciating the fact that he too appreciated it. I also remember one of his tweets from like eight months later that was basically like "Holy shit I cannot believe that Jack White released an album this year and that I apparently liked it." I can't find the tweet now, but it's a dumb take, and also a relatable one. Sometimes I'm high on music because I want to write about it and then six months after writing about it I can't tell you one fucking thing about it. I think it's more of an indictment of music criticism in general than of Jack White's recent music output, but what the fuck do I know?

NEXT TIME: Probably won't be a next time for a while, so who knows. Maybe I can circle back to Blind Melon?