Jack White: Entering Heaven Alive — charmingly offbeat love songs

Jack White reckons that his recent album Fear of the Dawn has “my proudest guitar playing I’ve ever done”, as he told Variety magazine. It strikes a fine balance between big squealing riffs, as uncomplicated as a sledgehammer, and daredevil solos that treat the instrument’s strings as tightropes, a tour de force of imaginative fretwork.

Released just three months later, Entering Heaven Alive is the mellow twin to its pumped-up predecessor, with White largely swapping his electric guitar for an acoustic model. In opener “A Tip From You to Me”, he sings about being alone in the night, a reference to the nocturnal setting of Fear of the Dawn. “Will love leave me alone tonight?” he asks. Those familiar with his previous unplugged work in The White Stripes and his solo career will know the answer.

Give White an acoustic guitar or a piano and he will go at them hammer and tongs, but his tender side will invariably make an appearance. One of The White Stripes’ best-loved numbers, “Hotel Yorba”, is a roughly strummed acoustic stomper that ends with a marriage proposal. White played it at an April gig in his old home city of Detroit just before proposing to and promptly marrying his musician girlfriend Olivia Jean on stage.

Entering Heaven Alive is full of love songs. As sung by White, whose normal vocal style is that of someone struggling to escape a straitjacket, their romantic sentiments verge on the peculiar. “I love you like my mother loves me,” he avows in “Queen of the Bees”, a reminder that he and previous wife Meg White pretended to be siblings while in The White Stripes. But the song itself, a jaunty Jungle Book breeze with ticklish marimba rhythms and a groovy electric organ solo, is charmingly offbeat.

“I’ve Got You Surrounded (With My Love)” is a piece of jazzy exotica during which his electric guitar gets an outing. “Taking Me Back (Gently)” redoes a track from Fear of the Dawn as a fiddle-led caper with a Django Reinhardt-style acoustic solo. In its quieter, less flashy way, Entering Heaven Alive finds White challenging himself as much as he did on Fear of the Dawn, and as rewardingly.

★★★★☆

‘Entering Heaven Alive’ is released by Third Man