“Blunderbuss” by Jack White, verily a Prince Amongst Men.

Jack White is Bob Dylan’s much younger and much more indus­tri­ous baby broth­er. Incred­i­bly, he very near­ly has the great man’s depth of vision and musi­cal scope, but unbur­dened by the weight of mes­sian­ic adu­la­tion, nice and qui­et­ly he’s liv­ing the musi­cal dream.

Glob­al­ly speak­ing, the White Stripes were lit­tle more than A N Oth­er gui­tar band mak­ing a rea­son­ably good liv­ing doing their thing. With­in the world of music though, they were a phe­nom­e­non. A blind­ing­ly bright light­en­ing bolt that lit up the night skies in a flash of uncom­pro­mis­ing, sear­ing brilliance.

White took that suc­cess and ran with it. He formed a cou­ple of satel­lite bands, The Racon­teurs and The Dead Weath­er, launched his record label Third Man Records, and in 2009 bought a build­ing in Nashville which he trans­formed into a record­ing hub. 

There he’s pro­duced LPs and sin­gles (on vinyl of course) for the likes of Loret­ta Lynn, Wan­da Jack­son, First Aid Kit (reviewed here), Jer­ry Lee Lewis, Tom Jones and Alaba­ma Shakes (reviewed here) as well as duet­ing with Norah Jones for three of the tracks on Dan­ger Mouse’s Rome (reviewed here).

But last year The White Stripes offi­cial­ly called it a day. And then a few months lat­er, White and his wife Karen Olson split up, mark­ing the occa­sion, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly, with a divorce par­ty. So this is his first out­ing as a sin­gle man. And there were real­ly only ever two pos­si­ble outcomes. 

Either the Stripes depend­ed for their mag­ic on some intan­gi­ble alchem­i­cal com­bi­na­tion of both Meg and Jack. Or, the most potent force in rock will always be Jack White with who­ev­er it is that he’s hap­pens to have paired him­self up with that par­tic­u­lar morn­ing. Blun­der­buss puts that dilem­ma to bed once and for all.

It’s intrigu­ing, not to say gen­er­ous, of White to insist that it was Meg who wore the trousers in the band, as he does in Josh Eells’ superb inter­view in the NY Times here – sit­ed in Pitch­fork’s gen­er­ous review here, not with­stand­ing their skimpy 7.8.

But it’s blind­ing­ly obvi­ous that it was he who was the band’s engine, its fuel, trans­mis­sion and uphol­ster­er. And Blun­der­buss is an impres­sive amal­ga­ma­tion of all of the musi­cal avenues he’s been explor­ing in all of the many musi­cal projects he’s been involved with to date.

Accord­ing to the inter­view he gave to All Songs Con­sid­ered here, he kept two sep­a­rate back­ing bands on hold, an all-male one and an all-female one. And one of the many plea­sures that the album affords is try­ing to spot which one is which.

I’d have a small wager that the funky groves of I’m Shakin’ bespeak a female troupe, and not just because of the lush, Spec­tor-esque female back­ing vocals, includ­ing, again char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly (of them both) his now ex-wife Olsen. 

Whilst it’s impos­si­ble not to con­clude that the pri­mal propul­sion of the majes­tic sin­gle Six­teen Saltines is the work of undi­lut­ed machis­mo – and quite cor­rect­ly, White posi­tioned this as his track 2. The album would have been quite over­whelmed by it had he begun with it.

This is a prop­er piece of work from a very seri­ous musi­cian indeed. Quite sim­ply, the man’s royalty.

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