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The White Stripes Icky Thump Released in 2007 4.7/10 Styles Rock Song Highlights Icky Thump You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told) Rag and Bone |
You used to need to go to a live show for your evidence that Jack White was turning The White Stripes into his own outlet for self-centered guitar wankery, but with their latest effort Icky Thump, it's become quite clear that not even their studio albums are safe anymore. It's become abundantly clear that Jack is determined to make his random guitar histrionics the centrepiece and driving force of every White Stripes song. In the live shows, it seemed at least somewhat forgivable - after all, bands are meant to embelish their catalogue with extra flair during live renditions - but it's turned Icky Thump into a monumental disappointment, as their worst album yet. The best way to point out the problems with Icky Thump is to look at its first two tracks (also its first two singles), "Icky Thump" and "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)". Both of these have the potential to be excellent tracks, amongst the duo's best, but are bogged down with superfluous "extra bits". "Icky Thump" has a terrific, menacing sound, thanks to its grinding, distorted guitar line and absolutely crushing riff (one of White's best in some time), while "You Don't Know What Love Is" is a fantastic piece of radio-friendly rock, with a great, catchy melody. However, a wedge is driven into each of these songs, by Jack White's inexplicable urge to play seemingly random guitar lines during them. These aren't interesting enough to be called "solos" - this is Jack White playing (I kid you not) scales, but really, really loudly. Both songs, which until that point have built up a strong momentum, hit an enormous brick wall. "You Don't Know What Love Is" is strong enough that it makes a full recovery, while "Icky Thump" barely manages to claw its way back. It gets worse before it gets better, unfortunately. If this kind of lack of constraint can drag great songs into being mediocre, imagine what it does for songs which were pretty dull to start with. That's right, you're left with a six track run that barely even registers. "Conquest" is a hilariously ill-advised attempt at introducing mariachi-style brass into the Stripes' formula, while the mostly-instrumental "St. Andrew (This Battle is in the Air)" does the same only with bagpipes, and the other four are so forgetable as to not even be worth mentioning. Throughout all of this, poor Meg White gets dragged along behind Jack's rock-messiah complex. Given that she's the drummer, it'd be awfully nice if Jack would allow her to take control of the rhythm and tempo from time to time, but instead she's left with the unenviable task of trying to drum along appropriately to whatever noodling Jack seems to be in the mood for. The White Stripes have always had a particularly scrappy sound, but it's been Meg's rudimentary-yet-powerful drumming that's provided them with their much needed backbone. Here the songs flounder hopelessly, sounding like a terrible, disorganised mess, vaguely reminiscient of a once-great band. The album's singular A+ moment comes with its gleefully fun centrepiece "Rag and Bone", which casts Jack and Meg as career burglars with delusions of samaritanism. The beat is strong and tight, the riff is massive, the lyrics are a blast and the spoken word interludes - something quite unusual for a White Stripes track - are delivered beautifully, with downright hilarious results. Everything that Jack (and I won't say "and Meg", because it's so clear that Jack completely runs this duo) does wrong on the rest of the album, he does absolutely right on "Rag and Bone." Perhaps there's still some hope for album number seven. "I'm Slowly Turning into You" and "Effect and Cause" also manage to provide some minor relief, although I suspect that's mostly because they're merely decent by comparisson - measured up against juggernauts like "Blue Orchid" or "Fell in Love With a Girl", they suddenly become severely average. The White Stripes function best when they play straightforward rock songs that are short and mostly to-the-point (see De Stijl or White Blood Cells) or when they experiment with instrumentation and song structure (see Elephant and Get Behind Me Satan). On Icky Thump Jack White seems determined to do both, but does such a poor job of it that it falls wide of the mark on all but a few tracks. Playing with song structures means a lot more than inserting random, totally unsuitable guitar interludes into the middle of a track; experimenting with instrumentation requires sensible decisions to be made on the selection and use thereof; and, of course, you can't play a straightforward, catchy rock song without a solid rhythm section, and Jack White seems intent on relegating Meg to "underling" status. He's determined to play the ringleader in his own little circus, screwing around with a proven formula - in the past it's amounted to praiseworthy ambition, but on Icky Thump it just sounds like lazy, egotistical garbage. My recommendation is to download "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)" and "Rag and Bone", and save yourself the disappointment of the rest of the album. |