If you'd never heard The White Stripes [ tickets ] before. Or The Raconteurs. If you didn't know about odd sister/brother-husband/wife scenarios, the obediently adhered to white-black-red color schemes or the references, every time the band is mentioned, to poor drumming, Detroit and something called garage rawk: chances are you'd simply see "Icky Thump," the band's latest, as an inventive album by some talented people who like to borrow from the past.

It starts hard, opening with the very metal title song that does, rather loudly, thump. But when the next song, "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do What You're Told)," dips far into '70s classics--echoing Bad Company's "Shooting Star"--it becomes clear the record won't be sticking to one theme. Bagpipes and an in-the-round sound help "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn" become a great Celtic rag, almost a sea shanty. "Bone Broke" is straightforward rock. And "Conquest," a rumbly cover of the '50s pop samba by Patti "Doggie in the Window" Page, actually includes a guitar-versus-mariachi-trumpet face-off.

If there's a lot here that still brings to mind a certain blues-tinged band--the Robert Plant tones in Jack White's voice are always inevitable--songs like the closer, "Effect and Cause," reach further back into blues and folk history. With stripped-down acoustic guitar and an advice-giving yarn ("You're like a little girl yelling at her brother/Cause you lost his ball"), songs like this make it easy to get past all that's said about the band, and all they've done before, and just listen.

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