Jack White - Love Interruption

We miss The White Stripes.

It’s easier if we just start this as honestly as we can. The White Stripes were brilliant - easily one of the most important bands of the last decade, they were capable, at the height of their powers, of being everything that’s great about music. Jack White, out of The White Stripes, was brilliant. Less so Jack White from The Raconteurs, or Jack White from The Dead Weather (though he was still quite brilliant). Jack White out of - erm - Jack White, well, that’s a whole new thing.

‘Love Interruption’, the first cut from White’s debut solo album ‘Blunderbuss’, is not a White Stripes song, and yet it could so easily be. It has no drums, it has no wailing electric guitars, but it does have that same magic - so much so that if it was, we’d be celebrating something potentially on a par with their very best moments. Even with it’s downbeat lyrical content (‘I want love to change my friends to enemies and show me how it’s all my fault’), there’s something special at work.

For the first time in a long time, it’s easy to hear just why White is held in such great esteem. If this is his big post White Stripes shot, then the relatively minimalist arrangement on offer should do little to detract from what might be the best song he’s written in an age. Forget all those side projects, rush releases and mad collaborations. If they were a warm up for this, there might still be something about Jack worth getting excited about.



‘Blunderbuss’ is released via Third Man Records / XL Recordings on 23rd April 2012.