White’s new album is a step away from his earlier guitar-dominated work. With a more country-blues feel to it, Blunderbuss’s opening song ‘Missing Pieces’ hints at the singer’s recent divorce. “When someone tells you they can’t live without you, they ain’t lying,” sings White; his voice is both soft and brooding and is never drowned by the surrounding instruments. Instead it moves playfully around gentle piano and guitar arrangements. The acoustic beauty of ‘Love Interruption’ is one of the album’s highlights. This is not heavy rock: this is something all together different to the White Stripes.
Intimate, passionate and almost confessional, Blunderbuss draws heavily on White’s ‘third father’, Bob Dylan (alongside his biological father and God, he says), whose album Blood On The Tracks deals with similar issues.
Anguish and regret characterise the album’s opening, whilst the journey picks up speed in the following songs towards its climax, ‘Take Me With You When You Go’, which finally indulges the listener in White’s primal guitar riffs and intense vocals.
Having knocked Adele off the album charts’ top spot Blunderbuss is proving to be seriously popular. In terms of his signature guitar style, there is some disappointment. But to simply mimic his earlier successes would be futile for White; he is as much a country-blues musician as a heavy rock guitarist. By sidestepping the option to write more of the same Jack White has created something not entirely groundbreaking, but nonetheless something no one was expecting. Book-ended by two excellent tracks – with a few decent others thrown in – the album shamelessly draws parallels to Dylan; it’s the same old journey of breaking up and moving on.
The closing track is White at his best: his signature guitar and intense vocals sound as good as ever. We can only hope this is the direction he is now heading in.