Fair play to Jack White. After the White Stripes dissolved in 2011 he really did move on: country rock, synths, Q-Tip collaborations. Only now, with his sixth solo album, No Name, has he returned to the well of raw and riotous blues-rock delivered in the style of a possessed carny, and bagged his best reviews in years. Even his hair has regressed from an aqua-blue quiff to that old crow-black mop. True to the album’s guerrilla release campaign, he’s playing the kind of venues he outgrew around 9/11.
It has to be said White is not messing about. His band – drummer Patrick Keeler, bassist Dominic Davis and keyboardist Bobby Emmett, who looks like a defrosted Ramone – is one he might have formed back in 1997 if not for Meg White and conceptual purity: more conventional but thrillingly feral in the mode of his Detroit forebears the Stooges and MC5. Each song climaxes in the style of a building being demolished, then it’s straight into the next. At times they sound like a hooligan Rage Against the Machine or a basement-dwelling AC/DC. New songs like the irresistible, hilarious Archbishop Harold Holmes tumble into irradiated White Stripes classics, sprouting outrageous guitar solos and cacophonous outros.
