Entertainment

White earns his own stripes

There’s little blundering on Jack White’s first solo album, which combines loud guitar riffs with delicate piano. His Rancounters bandmate Brendan Benson (below, right) also has a new solo album. (
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There’s little blundering on Jack White’s first solo album, which combines loud guitar riffs with delicate piano. His Rancounters bandmate Brendan Benson (below, right) also has a new solo album. (
)

Album of the Week

JACK WHITE

“Blunderbuss”

★★★½

The arrival of Jack White’s first solo record promises to settle a question that’s had fans racked with suspense:

Can White survive without former White Stripes bandmate Meg White?

OK, maybe there hasn’t been a lot of hand wringing about that one, given the along for the ride nature of Meg’s presence.

Still, White is a bona fide rock star in an era that doesn’t mint many of those, so his first official solo outing feels like an event. And White delivers, with a collection that retains the Stripes’ crackling intensity while following White’s edgy muse into some new territory.

He still delivers loud guitars and big riffs— most notably on “Sixteen Saltines,” whose glammy crunch will connect with Stripes fans—and favors song structures that skip verse/chorus arrangements and instead work circular melodic figures like a dog gnawing a bone.

But he’s expanded his sonic palette, working pedal steel, mandolin, fiddle, delicate piano, even clarinet into the mix. In the lovely and plaintive title track, he spins a tale of an adulterous encounter at “a grand hotel of Persian thread and ivory” over alilting web of piano and pedal steel, bringing “Desire” era Dylan to mind. With its bouncy mandolin and ragtimey piano, “Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy” has an almost vaudevillian vibe, with a sunny melody that belies the lyrics’ bitter farewell blast. (They may be aimed at Meg, with lines such as “And you’ll be watching me girl/Taking over the world/Let the stripes unfurl.”)

Speaking of bitterness, there’s plenty to go around here. Take “Hypocritical Kiss,” a shot of undiluted vitriol delivered over a mournful piano and a rattling snare, to someone who “would sell your own mother out and then betray your dead brother with another hypocritical kiss.” (Note that Karen Elson, the model White divorced last year, sings backup on three tracks, as if to put to rest notions that she’s the target.)

References to knifings and severed limbs lend an occasional Gothic air to the proceedings, and there’s a certain dreamscape quality to “Blunderbuss,” with its sonic eccentricities and short songs that come and go like visitations. But at the same time it feels vital and immediate, suffused with the musical and spiritual restlessness of a man who’s determined to push himself, and who in “Love Interruption” may well be speaking of music rather than love when he sings, “I want love to grab my fingers gently/Slam them in a doorway/And put my face into the ground.”

Download of the Week

BRENDAN BENSON

“Keep Me”

★★½

Jack White’s Raconteurs bandmate Brendan Benson has his own record coming out today— “What Kind of World,” his fifth. It proves Benson is less averse than his old bandmate to sticking to a formula — in his case, ’70s influenced, guitar driven power pop. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as proven by this slinky minor-key number with a hummable chorus, which brings to mind the Easybeats filtered through ’80s new wave.