CD reviews: Jack White, and music from 'Treme'

POP/ROCK: Jack White, "Blunderbuss" (Third Man)

Over the past decade, White has turned each of his bands into an outlet for certain aspects of his musical personality: uber-rocker in the White Stripes, drummer in the Dead Weather, songwriting sidekick in the Raconteurs.

Now he's finally gotten around to putting out an album with his own name at the top. His solo debut stays clear of his comfort zone: the blues tropes and heavy guitars of the White Stripes and Dead Weather are pretty much missing in action. Instead he favors arrangements with piano, upright bass and a bit of a rural, country flavor provided by fiddles and pedal-steel guitar.

White has never spread himself so wide as a musician, ranging from the wall-rattling guitars of "Sixteen Saltines" to the string-band vaudeville of "Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy." Songs often flash multiple personalities, shifting tone as if to suggest some latent progressive-rock tendencies: the segue from cool-jazz breeziness into frantic rock in "Take Me With You When You Go" or the road song "On and On and On" that unfolds new musical scenery at every turn. Yet "Blunderbuss" is more than just a hodgepodge of influences. It's sequenced to play as a journey that is musical and psychological, a harrowing trip inside a collapsing relationship. Some may infer that the lyrics are all about White's divorce from Karen Elson, but then how to explain that she is all over the album as a backing vocalist?

This is less about personal confession than pulse-pounding storytelling. "Blunderbuss" is laced with American Gothic imagery, splashes of "Pulp Fiction" gore and Old Testament drama. There's poetry in the mayhem, too. The title track, about a tryst in an opulent hotel, brims with sharply written images of decadence as the narrator makes off with another man's wife. It's all too much, and White's narrator finally figures it out; as the album winds down, he slams on the brakes before he loses his mind or his life.

It makes for an entertaining roller coaster of a listen. One pictures a musician and songwriter not brooding over a failed relationship, but having a ball making an album full of tall tales and uninhibited music.

GREG KOT, CHICAGO TRIBUNE

This soundtrack to the second season covers plenty of territory, from the live version of "From the Corner to the Block," with funk band Galactic, rapper Juvenile and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, to the Cajun swinger "La Danse de Mardi Gras," which pairs Steve Riley with country troubadour Steve Earle. By throwing together actors who are musicians (and vice versa) with name brands such as Dr. John and Kermit Ruffins, plus lesser-known treasures such as John Boutte and Aurora Nealand, "Treme" creates a piquant, inimitably New Orleanian gumbo, full of musical truths cooked up for TV fiction.