All Aboard The Blunderbuss5 Out of 5 Stars
Well, no one can claim that Jack White was hoarding his best material for the Dead Weather or Raconteurs albums. "Blunderbuss," his first official solo album, is top heavy with raucous guitars, southern-fried blues, big, liquid guitar fuzz-bomb solos, and White's odd view of the world. When your first song is about a woman who - literally - takes pieces of you with her, you know you're not in for your typical guitar hero album.
"Blunderbuss" tackles the radical sides of love almost as viciously as Marilyn Manson did on his new album. On the big noise of "Sixteen Saltines," White sings about the femme fatale whose "spiked heels put a hole in the lifeboat." Or "Love Interruption," the acoustic-ish number where White wants her so bad that he wants to turn "His friends into enemies." He's got it bad, and for us, that's good. Or the title track, where he moans that "doing what two people need is never on the menu."
Along with the great guitar, While pulls out an oldie to play about with (and would have fit in just as nicely on his production of Wanda Jackson), "I'm Shakin'." Originally by bluesman Little Willie John (and well covered in the 80's by The Blasters), White gets playful, again about another questionable lady who'll make him 'noivous' or get his locks clipped ala Samson and Delilah. While I certainly can't psychoanalyze the guy's "Blunderbuss" obsession with threatening women, I do hear the grooves in the album that he's inspired to make. His guitar is doing the bulk of the talking, the songs are all killer. This is on my shortlist for favorite album of 2012.
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