Album Preview: Jack White's "Blunderbuss"

Spring comes and a younger man's fancy turns to romance—or kvetching about it anyway. And not just any random branch of romance but the rock-star variety—that beautifully dark and twisted musical variation Betty Davis identified as the "anti-love song," back when she was rocking Miles Davis's world.

Since Jack Whiteis the young dude in question and not your reporter (who hasn't sought solace or catharsis from mantic music in more springs than he dare recall), we might expect these songs to be wildly expressionistic, abstract and wise in the art of joyous noise and industrial design. This much we can confirm to be true.

Blunderbuss is White's first official solo album, though the man is too much the control tweak for that not to be sonically true of every White Stripes album, and maybe even his collabs with The Raconteurs and Loretta Lynn.

Blunderbuss is White's first official solo album (you can stream the entire album for free on iTunes), though the man is too much the control tweak for that not to be sonically true of every White Stripes album, and maybe even his collabs with The Raconteurs and Loretta Lynn.

The word "Blunderbuss" comes to us from the history of Dutch weaponry. It derives from the word "donderbus," refers to a muzzle-loading firearm, and in translation comes out as something like "thunder box." The transition from donder to blunder is thought by some to be deliberate; the term blunder was originally synonymous with confusion, and this is thought to describe the stunningly loud report of the large-bore, short-barreled blunderbuss.

Dragons were carved into early versions of the weapon because the muzzle blast gave the impression of a fire-breathing dragon. The gun became popular with dragon/dragoon legions whose job was to subjugate or persecute Protestants; and "to compel by any violent measures or threats." So let's assume White wants us to associate his album of anti-love songs with fire-breathing dragons and a thunderbox of confusion, assault and repression.

This easily suggests a caterwauling and cacophonous palette will be in deploy. But Blunderbuss's Crayola box is actually more '70s Paul McCartney in affection than My Bloody Valentine—and a McCartney album produced by Allen Toussaint at that.

The dominant instrumental voice on the thing here is acoustic and electric piano—played with adept aplomb by White and the loverly Ms Brooke Waggoner, both of whom don't mind conjuring up echoes of Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elton John, Leon Russell and Freddy Mercury. (FYI The rest of the band listed on the sleeve is very pro-femme).

An unexpected mix of upbeat melodies, barrel-house pianistics, and White's sarcastic but dour lyrics mark Blunderbuss as a peculiar, novel and abundantly tuneful event.

All the songs display a flair for the theatrical that is less arena-rock than musical theater in that Gilbert and Sullivan operettas kind of way, and hence a McCartney-ish way as well. The keyboards give the album as unified a sound as drums, guitar and voice did The Stripes. An unexpected mix of upbeat melodies, barrel-house pianistics, and White's sarcastic but dour lyrics mark Blunderbuss as a peculiar, novel and abundantly tuneful event.

Since White turns out to be as fetching and dramatic a rock pianist as plectrumist, this kinder, genteel Blunderbuss experiment of his comes with ivory-tickling legs, balls and teeth. A romp and a hoot throughout, this is the sound of one man and his fire-breathing blunderbuss clapping over a new band with a very professional female rhythm section in no need of being rationalized as performance art conceit.

Besides being an ear-tingling occasion for various levels of payback, getback and comeback, Blunderbuss also seems bent on guaranteeing White lose a few friends—not exclusively meaning ones who liked him better when he was stage-wedded to his ex-drummer/wife, Meg.

Written by Greg Tate

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"Missing Pieces" sets the tone for the sorrow and pitiless mirth that saturates the album. It saves its best and most forlorn verse for last: "Sometimes someone controls everything about you/And when they tell you that they just can't live without you/They ain't lying/They'll take pieces of you." Call it a fantasically literal notion of a break-up song.

For older White and Stripes fans, "Sixteen Saltines" will be That Shiznitt. That four-to-the-floor blast of unleashed guitar aggression swung at every lovesick fool who ever spent hours, days and weeks awake wondering "Who's fucking her now?"

"Freedom At 21" sounds like its wants to be Blunderbuss's "Seven Nation Army"—got that long, loping heavy asymmetrical riff thing going on for sure. A cat in the British press who recently interviewed White asked him if the song was about an antipathy towards feminism and White replied "No," saying it was really more or less about how sick he was of body-snatching cell phones. But the lyrics split the difference, it seems to me. Like Jack doesn't seem too happy about the superdiva honey in question's exercising of free will, or the "two black gadgets" she's sporting all the time either.

The warmth of the Fender Rhodes mitigates the bitter irony couched in the faux-romantic lyrics on "Love Interruption." A song for everybody who's ever come out on the other side of a break-up contemplating the thin line between true love and utter self-loathing.

Bottom line with the consistently high degree of impassioned and ingenious songcraft on this collection is that White should get divorced more often. Ditto for sleeping with other cats' squeezes because you got it like that. This just might be the most dastardly pimpin', cheatin' and cuckoldin' celebration-in-song written since Sonny Boy Williamson was still among us.

Grandiose arpeggios on a saloon piano—there may no better vehicle for nakedly calling out a former friend as all kinds of fake and for humbling that ass with one's own grandiosity in the bargain. When rock stars attack their boys still on the grind—yikes. Not quite this generation's "Like A Rolling Stone" or "Ballad of a Thin Man," but vicious enough to insure that dude, whoever the fluke he thinks he is, will now give Frere Jacques a wide berth on the sidewalk and at industry-gatherings of shattered dreams.

From White's hyper-Shady vocal cadence alone you can't tell me he didn't write this for him and Eminem to bond over as the Detroit area's darkest pink-complected alpha males. The wrenching guitar work is the best approximation we've heard for what it must feel like to have a victorious Predator tear your spine out through your frigging mouth.

A tossed-off punkabilly rendition of a Bo Diddley ditty, replete with a chorus of whoos, handclaps and stop-time breaks. This is the kind of roadhouse excitement-inducer that makes you wish a ninja would step on your blue suede Pumas.

We're going to go out on and limb and imagine this country-blues stomp is wickedly and wantonly directed at the Lindsey Lohans of this world. Neither Jerry Lewis nor Billy Preston would be mad at how White rips sanctified trills and triplets out of those keys here. All it's missing is a guest verse from Snoop for maximum stank-ass ho-'bashing.

This is the one deliberately set to get tongues-a-wagging for how explicitly and snarkily it kisses-off Meg and the Stripes and narcissistically keeps it moving. For no reason other than that I'm a '90s-hip-hop-damaged ninja, the joint conjures up a line Parrish Smith dropped on EPMD's 'Head Banger": ''To hell with the bitches and the so-called fame.'' Which could also be heard as the overriding subtext of this quite spritely, sumptuous and ingeniously rockist album.

This one begins in early Tom Waits territory, then goes a little wiggy, and then even a tad Ziggy. Like some manic French film noir aire gone even more berserker. Another saloon piano work-out, only more plaintive, as it wants to be, when it needs to be.

"The people around me/Won't let me become what I want to/They want me the same/I look at myself and I want to just cover my eyes/ And give myself a new name." Now you could read that as a typical rock celebrity's lament over how awful and lockstep life as a charting bullet has become. Then again you could read this entire album as a tuneful skin-shedding and a-morphing of young Jack into a genuine monster of riddlesome angst-rawk.

"Take Me With You When You Go" is, musically speaking, like some ole baroque-prog spiked with snorted helium and mentholated glue. Like Abbey Road gone mad deep into the Court of the Crimson King. And stuff like that.