"A romantic bust a blunder turned explosive blunderbuss"
So for the past two weeks I've been listening to Jack White's first solo album Blunderbuss. If you aren't sure who Jack White is, you might know him better as one half of the powerful boy/girl duo White Stripes (and if you aren't familiar with the White Stripes, do yourself a favor and listen to their epic album Elephant). Over the last few years he has also branched off into the Raconteurs (a bit more rock/folk) and the Dead Weather (dirty blues) and I've loved it all.
"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"
This solo album, though came as more of a surprise to me. We heard Jack trade in his roaring guitar for a drum set in the Dead Weather, but here we find him on piano for most of the album. He eases us in to the change over the first few songs, with Sixteen Saltines feeling the most like classic Jack (and is currently my favorite track off the album). From there he slowly edges us away from the familiar and in to his new sound.
"She doesn't know, but when she's gone I sit and drink her perfume..."
You can still hear influences from his other projects, bits here sound reminiscent of Racontuers, others remind me of Dead Weather, and he seems to have incorporated a little southern charm in other places, but the most obvious is still White Stripes. He may be playing in a new sandbox, but he hasn't forgotten where he came from.
"I won't let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me"
Lyrically, I think this is one of Jack's strongest albums. He's always been a master wordsmith, his linguistics improving over the years, and here he constructs songs with such a seamless flow of words, syllables and sounds that it's hard to imagine replacing any of them.
"And men who fight the world and love the girls that try to hold their hands behind them, they won't be left behind by time or any rules that try to bind them"
His varied projects have let him experiment and express different sides of his musical talent, and this album is another great piece of the collection. I definitely recommend it if you're a fan of any of his previous work. Jack White is a true musician.
"The sun and the moon never change, they just rearrange. The night and the new day. Gold exchanges for silver and the light on a river gets carried away"
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