Un-Striped:
Jack White reemerges as a consummate stylist on Blunderbuss
Jack
White, Blunderbuss (Third Man)
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| JACK'S BACK: White trades his reds for blues |
It's
been almost a full five years since the Detroit-bred blooze-punk duo the White
Stripes delivered their last, and apparently final, full-length studio album,
2007's sublimely searing Icky Thump.
Since then, the band's frontman, singer/guitarist Jack White has released two
discs with the Dead Weather, an alt-rock supergroup of sorts featuring White
playing drums behind singer Allison Mosshart of the Kills, Queens of the Stone
Age multi-iinstrumentalist Dean Fertita, and bassist Jack Lawrence, who's also
part of the Racounteurs, another of White's side-projects. He's also
established himself as an in-demand producer in his new home base of Nashville,
working with artists as diverse as rockabilly legend Wanda Jackson, the
goth-leaning Black Belles, and the goofy horror-rap duo Insane Clown Posse. A
White Stripes rockumentary, Under the Great Northern Lights,
premiered in 2009, the same year Jack and drummer Meg White made what turned
out to be their swan song performance on the last installment of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. And Jack
turned up singing alongside Norah Jones last year on the Danger Mouse-produced
faux-movie soundtrack Rome. But
mostly there was just a whole load of rumors and speculation about the future
of the color-coordinated pair until Jack and Meg, who'd been married when the
band first emerged in 1999, finally announced the end of their White Stripes
odyssey early last year.
Jack's a canny character and self-styled
eccentric with an appreciation for the power of rock and roll mythologizing and
a history of bending the truth. (Most famously, he floated the notion that he
and Meg were brother and sister, not husband and wife, when they were busting
out of Detroit's lo-fi, garage-rock underground.) But, in the months leading up
to this week's release of his first solo album, the typically cryptic Blunderbuss, he's seemed fairly sincere
in his insistence that if Meg hadn't quit on him, he'd have happily continued
on with the White Stripes indefinitely — that he only reluctantly arrived at
the decision to record a solo album when Wu-Tang Clan rapper RZA failed to show
for a session at Jack's studio.
Regardless of the merits of that particular story, Meg appears
to have done Jack a solid by setting him loose to follow his muse past the
self-imposed limitations of a bass-less duo, to expand his musical vistas
beyond the crash-and-thump of her primal drumming paired with churn-and-squeal
electro-blues guitar. The White Stripes tried something of the sort on the
second-to-last album, 2005's largely acoustic Get Behind Me Satan. And it went on to win the Grammy that year for
"Best Alternative Music Album." But, by Icky Thump, Jack had returned to the White Stripes’ real comfort
zone — updating old Son House/Blind Willie McTell blues tropes with epic Zeppelinesque
riffage that took the grit of the garage to the arena stage. With Meg following
his every sinewy move on guitar, and happily playing the straight woman to his
unhinged flights of vocal fancy, it just sort of felt like Jack had perhaps
gone as far as he could with that particular act.
Which is not to say that the White Stripes won’t be missed.
Because, for the most part, Blunderbuss
is a far cry from the raw power Jack and Meg were capable of generating. The
disc opens with just the kind of retro sounding electric piano (it’s
Fender-Rhodes, to be exact) White covets, propelling a reasonably rocking and
rather amusing tale of love gone wrong. “I woke up and my hands were gone,
yeah,” Jack sings with false alarm, “I looked down and my legs were long gone/I
felt for her with my shoulder/But there was nobody there.” White gets off one
of his wild, over-bent guitar solos, but it’s only a quickie that gives way to
soulful ’70s electric piano grooving. “Sixteen Salteens,” an amped-up garage
rocker replete with a nice, meaty guitar riff and suitably pounding drums, also
provides a pleasant echo of White Stripes past, as does the skewed “Freedom at
21,” a tune built around a snaking guitar riff and a whole lotta playfully
nonsensical, mad-daddy testifying by White.
But those tunes (the disc’s first three), as well as a
straight-up retro romp through Rudolph Toombs’ feverish r&b novelty number
“I’m Shakin’,” are essentially pleasant little blasts from White’s past on an
album that moves rather rapidly on to the more refined pleasures of the
cocktail piano chordings, strummed acoustic guitar, and swaying beat of
“Hypnotic Kiss.” Even the stormy “Weep Themselves to Sleep,” which opens with
some fighting words from White (“No one can blow the shows/Or throw the bones
that break your nose/Like I can”), largely concedes the foreground to eloquent
piano figures rather than the guitar that churns in the backdrop. And the
disc’s title track relies on piano and pedal steel to set its undulating,
countrified tone.
If instrumentation is any indication, then White’s deployment
of piano and acoustic/stand-up bass throughout Blunderbuss may be a reliable sign of what’s to come. Or, perhaps,
like the mariachi horns that turned up on Icky
Thump, it’s just another one of White’s fleeting fancies. Either way, Blunderbuss isn’t so much a defining
artistic statement as it is a compelling reminder that White is consummate
stylist. And, it’s likely to be quite some time before he runs out of new ways
to mess with anything resembling an easy definition of artistry.
