Jack White brought an itchy, adventuresome attitude to the White Stripes. That made Blunderbuss particularly intriguing, since it seemed to confirm the surprising notion that his muse had never been fully explored.
It wasn’t like White completely discarded familiar sounds and textures after stepping out on his own. You heard something of his former group throughout this solo debut, and something of White’s many collaborative efforts since his partnership with ex-wife Meg White suddenly blew apart: There was a riff reminiscent of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” on the “Freedom at 21,” and “Trash Tongue Talker” strongly recalled his then-recent grease-popping R&B work with Wanda Jackson.
But, more often, Blunderbuss sounded like nothing he’d ever done before. The album was so full of musical ambition and quirky twists and thrilling chance-taking turns and startling successes that it forced White into a whole new light.
Were the White Stripes – who in retrospect now sounded startlingly direct, maybe too conservative – actually holding him back?
White didn’t simply discard his old band’s combination of nervy Delta blues and unmoored punk attitude; he roared past it. There was so much diversity, such a multiplicity of imagination and kitchen-sink don’t-give-a-shit-ism, that Blunderbuss arrived in April 2012 like a ready-made greatest-hits package: Every song was both unto itself and part of a larger journey.
Listen, and really hear, the lyrics to “On and On and On,” and they work first as desperate plea and then as determined valedictory: “The people around me won’t let me become what I need to,” White sings. “They want me the same. I look at myself and I want to just cover my eyes and give myself a new name.” In keeping, White aspired here to the same illuminative vistas of, say, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass.
He was pushing hard, in the same way that Harrison did, against his own boundaries: From the country-soul solitude of “Love Interruption” to the jazz-inflected anthem “I Guess I Should Go to Sleep,” from the sumptuous psychedelia of “Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy” to the slasher-flick guitar asides on “16 Saltines,” White simply redrew every conclusion we’d already settled on.
Maybe some simply saw Blunderbuss as a distillation – in particular those who had closely followed Jack White through his early musical iterations in the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and then the Dead Weather. There were, of course, elements inside each of them that pointed to his abiding passion for revivalist rock, and for trying things within that template.
But to my ear, none of them dared open up, to really feel around on the edges, like Blunderbuss. His dizzying aspirations here firmly pressed the accelerator toward every exciting musical offramp that’s followed.
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