Album Review: The White Stripes, "Icky Thump" (Third Man/Warner Bros.)
If you'd never heard The White Stripes 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.
- Artist Links:
Meg White weds Jackson Smith in double ceremony [May 2009]
Featured Photos: The White Stripes, Bonnaroo Festival, Manchester, TN - June 17, 2007 [February 2009]
The White Stripes to play out Conan O'Brien [February 2009]
Amy Winehouse cleans up at the Grammys [February 2008]
The 50th Annual Grammy Awards winners [February 2008]
2007's Best Albums: Critics 'Ga Ga' over Spoon [December 2007]
Pearl Jam moving forward with 'Backspacer'
Paul McCartney adds 'final' summer shows in Tulsa, Dallas
Sondre Lerche maps fall tour behind new album
Brandi Carlile follows 'Ghost' on fall trek
Living Colour steps through 'Doorway' on fall trek

