Several years of unrelenting praise has dulled our appreciation of the White Stripes. But “Under Blackpool Lights,” the band’s first ever concert DVD – or live release of any format, for that matter – renews it.

The band has long been celebrated as the best live act going, and this performance from a show last January in Blackpool, England, expels any controversy from that claim. Shot on super 8 and 16 mm film, and directed by Dick Carruthers (who has also done performance DVDs for Led Zeppelin and the Who), it has a grainy look that perfectly suits the band’s retro rock quality.

Technically speaking, the White Stripes is a duo, but while Meg White’s moonish face and Lisa Yuskavage figure hold their own in photo spreads, she all but disappears on stage. You only see Jack White. His wild hair. His pale muscularity. His whirlwind movements. His split-leg, harlequin pants. His crazed Jack-Nicholson-in-“the-Shining” expression. It’s all riveting to watch.

He’s no musical genius – in fact, many of the songs aren’t even good if you only listen to them – but he is a physical force and a giant personality. The only performer of his own generation who even compares is Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but the more tempting comparison is James Brown.

Casual fans may best remember the band surrounded by a phalanx of bopping, white-and-red-clad revelers at the 2002 MTV Movie Awards. This stripped down Blackpool set shows the folly of that approach. Here you are confronted with the fact that the band is essentially one man standing alone onstage with his guitar. Even as you watch it, it’s hard to believe he’s generating all that heat and sound by himself.

The music is compelling because it’s such a drastic departure from the band’s studio work. Like the best jazzmen, Jack is always exploring new ways through a song, seeing what it’s capable of and what it has to say. Only he does it more violently, sculpting with a wrecking ball and painting with a fire hose. On “Black Math,” he abstracts entire melodies to a few pops of feedback. On the original electric blues “Hardest Button To Button,” he bends and stretches notes on his guitar until they sound like a DJ warping a record. On “Jack the Ripper,” his lyrics become wounded animal yelps and trills.

The entire set is equally manic. Jack treats the concert as a continuous piece of music, a 75-minute medley. Sequential verses are approached as separate songs, and separate songs as sequential verses. It’s somehow perfectly natural when “I Think I Smell a Rat” flows into an a capella telling – and he does approach it like a storyteller – of the traditional song “Take a Whiff on Me.” But after awhile, Jack’s endurance proves greater than our own. We could use a breather, an acoustic number like “Your Southern Can Is Mine” or even the twee “We’re Going To Be Friends,” to break things up.

As he demonstrated on his recent collaboration with Loretta Lynn, Jack has an ear for country music’s damaged and more raucous sides. His cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” here is the same drink, but higher proof. It is desperate and angry and totally convincing despite the gender misplacement and almost death-metal approach.

Traditionalists can’t forgive Jack White the presumptuousness of his covers, but with him irreverence is a kind of reverence, and reinvention is the highest form of flattery. He treats Son House’s “Death Letter Blues” as punk with a pinkie slide. He explodes Dylan’s “Outlaw Blues,” then scavenges it for parts, using guitar solos like a soldering iron to piece it back together. For a moment, the song actually makes electric rock sound like an affront again, a lesson he no doubt learned from Dylan.

Jack’s argument – demonstrated rather than articulated – isn’t just that blues, country, and metal are part of the same continuum, but that at a high enough temperature, they all melt into the same stuff.