White Stripes

The White Stripes – Icky Thump

After briefly side projecting with Brendan Benson and cohorts in the Raconteurs, Jack White re-unites with his sisterly other-half, Meg White, to outfit themselves in their red, white and black costumery and return to their drum-guitar garage aesthetics. While there is still the blues swagger that enriched much of their early albums, now their sound has become so ferociously thick, Jack’s guitar so dense with distortion, that the pop garage-rock gets swallowed by metal riffs and the enormous cymbal crashes. Not that you’ll ever hear a whole album of redundancy. “Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn” merges a Scottish bagpipes and mandolin with sharp angular guitar shredding as if Riverdance was co-opted by punk rockers. Some tracks are instantly recognizably White Stripes: the Jack’s Thor hammer punch on “Little Cream Soda”, Meg’s tribal drum beat opening “Rag And Bone”. Never as straightforward as their dogmatic approach would imply, the White Stripes continue to have fun with the simplest of tools, to our benefit.