Frozen Charlotte      Artist: Jack WhiteLabel: Third Man RecordsJack White has never been big on reinvention. Since the demise of his duo, The White Stripes, some 20 years ago, he has continued to chase the mother lode of crafting the ultimate 21st-century blues record. He has yet to turn that ambition into reality – everything he does gives off, to varying degrees, an aura of pastiche – yet that’s undoubtedly what gets him out of bed in the morning.He’s as bushy-tailed and eager as ever on his agreeable, moreish and, really, just, very, very Jack Whiteish seventh album, Frozen Charlotte. It fires on all pistons while never sounding like anything more or less than just another Jack White LP: he still sings like a tomcat who’s stepped in hot tarmacadam, while his caterwauling guitar keeps up his career-long argument for rudimentary production and songs that chuck in every kitchen sink to hand.It is, in other words, a record made for White and for his audience and that has no interest in appealing to anyone else. If anything, it feels actively unwelcoming to newcomers. Those who would happily see out the rest of their lives never, ever hearing the White Stripes staple Seven Nation Army again would do well to jog on. This is not an LP for them.You have to credit White for staying in the same trying-slightly-too-hard bluesman groove, regardless of extenuating circumstances. The backdrop to the release of Frozen Charlotte includes the death of his mother, in March, the collapse of his marriage – his wife of four years, Olivia Jean, filed for divorce in June – and a burgeoning career as a visual artist: Frozen Charlotte started as a 3D-printed mannequin inspired by early-20th-century dolls. But little of that drama intrudes on the album’s reliably rollicking opener, GOD and the Broken Ribs, or on Derecho Demonico, where White beefs up his guitar with swirls of Hammond organ. Yet if the music underpinning the record is more or less the same as that which sustained him through The White Stripes, between the cracks are hints that all is not right for White. He sounds dislocated as he shrieks his way through All Alone Again: “Folks say they need you and hug you when they greet you / but we’re all alone.”Feral angst also ripples through She’s in a Frenzy, where, against a Zeppelinesque racket, he proclaims, “Can you believe the things they’re saying? Lies that make me want to shout.”Shout he does, although the ferocity of his lyrics is thoroughly overshadowed by his regular supply of ferocious guitars, which rattle and roll, much as they always have in White’s universe, all the way back to Seven Nation Army.The White Stripes arrived just as rock’n’roll was escaping from the death grip of nu-metal and rediscovering the joys of scruffy music made by socially awkward outsiders (or, in the case of The Strokes, rich kids playing make-believe as socially awkward outsiders). In their day they were as big as any indie band, and Seven Nation Army will live forever as a terrace anthem.White’s disinclination to tweak the formula proved their undoing: the closest he came to a surprise was bunging in a bagpipe solo on their 2007 swan song, Icky Thump. It’s hard to say what their legacy is – or even if they really have one. A quarter of a century ago White was the true-blue purveyor of American rock; The Strokes were the fashionistas fast-talking their way to a career. But who, in 2026, enjoys the greater cultural clout?That lack of interest in pushing on is writ large on Frozen Charlotte. On and on it rumbles, weighed down by the trials of middle age, perhaps, but, in its essence, The White Stripes still tearing along the dotted line.White’s message to the world and to himself is “steady as she goes”. That will surely be a relief to fans – who, as with White, seem to like his music just as it is: old-fashioned, predictable and reliably hot to touch and ragged at the edges.