Patience is a virtue if you're a Jack White fan.

In the period since the last – and it will be the last – White Stripes album, he has knocked around with The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather and Danger Mouse, and while these won't exactly go down in history as White's wilderness years, they've yielded little more than one decent album-length playlist between them. So, if there's no chance of him getting together with drummer Meg for more dirty blues, then a solo album is surely the best means for him to rediscover his focus.

And so it proves with Blunderbuss: shorn of the co-writing/co-performing compromises that have diluted his talent in those other environments, White has delivered his best album since 2003's Elephant. The stung-by-love lyrics might seem at odds with the amicability of his divorce from model Karen Elson (she does backing vocals here), but there's a fresh sense of creative life to his work, from the trademark blues guitar howl of Sixteen Saltines, through the Dylanesque honkytonk of Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy to the way he wiggles like Robert Plant's tush through a cover of Little Willie John's I'm Shakin'.