CD of the Week: Jack White, Blunderbuss

• Jack White: Blunderbuss

Third Man Records/XL Recordings, £11.99

Rating: ****

Jack White hadn’t figured on going solo until he was around 40 years old. But then his first band split up, his second wife left him and he was

stood up by a member of the Wu Tang Clan. So Blunderbuss – a piece of antique weaponry that could blow your head clean off – is the upshot.

White has already dampened expectations of any self-revelation that might seep through this first album under his own (assumed) name. The way he tells it, he had some songs lying around which he had written on his own. RZA failed to honour his booking at White’s Nashville studio so he used the time himself, calling in a bunch of local players to bring them to life.

Already a veteran of three successful bands, White is well used to switching things up in order to stimulate fresh work. He may be missing his pop foil Brendan Benson from The Raconteurs and the garage rock shockwaves of The Dead Weather, powered by his own John Bonham-influenced drumming and Dean Fertita’s colossal synthquake. As for the early retirement of Meg White, let us just mutter a requiem for the rare chemistry of The White Stripes. But Blunderbuss is as swaggeringly confident as anything in his catalogue and more fully realised than some of his previous dalliances.

The album starts with a nosebleed and doesn’t get much prettier than that. The recurring theme of Blunderbuss is the violence of love, which White depicts as a stiletto puncture on a life raft, fingers slammed in a doorway, salt in an open wound and severed limbs. Love is literally a battlefield on this album.

But don’t worry – it’s not personal, claims White. His divorce from model/singer Karen Elson, celebrated simultaneously with their sixth anniversary at a private party last year, was amicable, and she sings backing on a number of tracks, in on the irreverent joke. Like PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, White is an expert at playing with characters and voices.

His imagery is so over-the-top and delivered with such gleeful relish that there is never any danger of mistaking these songs for a naked confessional, even if it is hard to credit that all this anger and hurt caused by women is entirely coincidental. Perhaps White is practising the fine art of sublimation – or even exorcism, given some of the visceral content of the album.

The playing is effortless and exemplary and the arrangements are something to savour. On Missing Pieces, he imagines that his ex-lover has literally run off with bits of him to the soothing, sultry backing of a Rhodes piano. Chunky Hammond organ licks supplement the kick-ass garage fuzz of Sixteen Saltines. The title was inspired by something his young daughter said to him, but White takes a strictly adult approach with the sexual double entendres. Not for the last time on the album, he multitracks his vocals, deploying falsetto to give that demented edge to his frothy fury.

His cover of Little Willie John’s I’m Shakin’ is a springy, sassy joy and well suited to White’s lyrical purposes here, making reference to that ultimate case of woman trouble, the story of Samson and Delilah. His version is punctuated with stabs of siren backing vocals.

White gets his right of reply to the message board haters on the stealthy, restrained rocker Freedom At 21, which presents as another wrath-of-a-woman-scorned number but is actually an elegant takedown of the conscience-free realm of the internet diss, and another fine example of White’s 21st-century blues. On the other hand, Trash Tongue Talker is a pretty clichéd Stonesy throwback, which fails to invigorate or update the source material. The multi-part Take Me With You When You Go is a more audacious pastiche of an epic 1970s rocker.

Hypocritical Kiss is a cooler reprimand and more chilling for it, while Weep Themselves To Sleep is a piano-led surge of bittersweet emotion.

Other more considered numbers include the soulful country waltz of the title track and the rootsy resignation of I Guess I Should Go To Sleep on which the protagonist is “upstairs, upstaged and upset”.

The clever cat-and-mouse game continues until the end of the line, with White appearing to indulge in some credible soul-searching on the swooning country lament On And On: “the people around me won’t let me become what I need to, they want me the same, I look at myself and I want to just cover my eyes and give myself a new name.”

But don’t waste a shred of pity on Jack White. Others may mourn the passing of The White Stripes and hanker for the old days but, as this album testifies, White has no difficulty in shedding his skin and moving on in his own casually brilliant way.

• Jack White: Blunderbuss

Third Man Records/XL Recordings, £11.99