White Stripes - Icky Thump

My feeling re: Wire is more an impression than anything else, and yes there's the whole minimalism ethos. But there's something about them that when I started thinking of them as a self-conscious art statement in general rather than 'just' a band, then all of a sudden they became about ten thousand times more interesting to me (and that feeling has remained to this day -- I find them incredibly easy to admire as a result). Similarly I was and still am mostly bored with all the roots/revival/redux talk, whereas seeing them as an incredibly modern/in the moment act that happens to use older elements as ingredients in a collage makes a lot more sense to me. In both cases, Wire feels like a logical reference point in trying to encapsulate these particular impressions. (That Jack and Meg may completely disagree with these impressions is all right to me -- this is the framework through which I enjoy the band more than anything else, and it doesn't have to be anyone else's.)

there are much more acts than only Wirh and WS doing the minimal thing you know

Actually Ned I remember some interview where Jack sounded weary of the White Stripes, exact words: "it's such an art project."

Ned OTM its a total art project with a deliberately contrived (and restricting) aesthetic

but then y'know interesting things happen when artists make up rules for themselves.

x-x-post -- Hahah, really -- if you could dig that up as a link or whatever I'd be intrigued.

Good points, Ned. White Stripes certainly follow the art-school aesthetic more successfully than, say, Fischerspooner.

Also, it's not like they've *hidden* their obvious knowledge of modern art. De Stijl, I ask you. So rather than thinking I've discovered a secret, I tend to think of it in terms of a logical teasing out of what they've long referenced.

good stuff ned, weird cuz i just read this and he say it don't matter none

"Icky Thump," the White Stripes

The White Stripes The mumbo jumbo surrounding the White Stripes is by now well known: Band members Jack White and Meg White are a divorced couple who refer to themselves as siblings; they're troglodytes, slavishly devoted to vintage gear; and you'll never see them wearing anything but red, white and black. ("Why would we be so bourgeois as to all of a sudden wear blue and green?" Jack recently asked an interviewer.) But, really, who cares? Was Foghat's fashion sense so heavily scrutinized? Was BTO burdened by self-mythology? Those aren't blind comparisons, either. For all their arty affectations, the White Stripes are basically blues-based hard rockers, far more in the tradition of Deep Purple than De Stijl (the Dutch art movement that gave the band's second album its name).

So forget about the band's new "Icky Thump," as a piece of fine art. How is it as a slab of rock? Well, it's harder and heavier than anything else the duo have ever done. Songs like the funky, metallic "I'm Slowly Turning Into You" and the creepy "A Martyr for My Love for You" combine Jack White's meatiest riffs with a newfound appreciation for groovy keyboard textures that deepen, but don't soften, the band's crunching sound. Meg White has stepped up her game too. In the past her one-two beats have tippy-toed between simple and simplistic, but throughout "Icky Thump" she matches Jack's guitar every stomp for glorious stomp. On the album's eponymous first single, Jack's muscular riffing and Meg's smashing drum work demolish any hope of resistance.

Resistance is a subject Jack White knows well. Whether it's wrestling with a neglectful deity on "Little Cream Soda" ("God screams to me/ There's nothing left for me to tell you") or his own material desires on "Rag and Bone" ("Come on and give it to me!"), "Icky Thump's" songs break down, with a few exceptions, to a catalog of denials and sacrifices. On the two or three songs where some slightly sub-excellent music can't compensate for the whining, Jack comes across as, well, a bit of a drip. But those scattered moments aside, "Icky Thump" is so vital and rocking it makes the band's preoccupation with high art and higher ideals seem silly. Who cares about colors when the music's this good?

Favorite Track: "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do as You're Told)"

xxx-post

ka-BOOM

http://www.slate.com/id/2094027/

x-post -- See, all THAT talk just bores and irritates me. It's criticism as kabuki, and as dedicated to its own tropes as Jack and Meg are to theirs. God knows I've fallen into the trap of obvious recitation more often than not, don't get me wrong. But this is the type of literary reclamation project that is redolent of the worst kind of 'gotta keep it REAL' approach to anything and everything out there under the sun, the more so because it's self-conscious about it -- 'forget all the art crap, RAWWWWK.' To my mind the 'colors' and much more besides multiply the potential pleasures rather than distract or subtract from them, and to stomp on them so literally implies willful abnegation.

In the end, taking sides: Jack and Meg vs. Gilbert and George (vs. Neil and Chris?) (if they're going to talk about being all UK-influenced on this album, let's go all out, then).

cmon Ned its all just bullshit maaaaaaan don't you like boobs and beer and loud guitars and stuff

yeah also, the deep purple comparison is just lazy...other than that they are both rock bands, like you really can't tell the difference between the stripe's strict minimalism and DP's over the top organ space truckin' guitar soloin', gillian bellowing thing? that just seems weird like he picked a 70s band out of a hat.

I THINK I can imagine Neil and Chris covering "Seven Nation Army."

just got the album today...

and i think this is really great. now that i don't just have a sketchy leak i can really hear the rockin on this.

i love the second half of the album a little more than the first. this is my favorite WS album since elephant

Also, it's not like they've *hidden* their obvious knowledge of modern art

I'd bet my life you know more about modern art than Jack White. I'd also bet it that you can't strut around and play the guitar and sing as wonderfully as he can.

cmon Ned its all just bullshit maaaaaaan don't you like boobs and beer and loud guitars and stuff

I don't know about the boobs? I loves me the whole damn woman!!! :~)

favorites off the album:

Bone Broke

Let's rock.

Little Cream Soda

Let's fucking rock some more!

You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)

Maybe too smooth for you, you...

Icky Thump

Would anybody care to dance?

Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn / St. Andrew (This Battle Is In The Air)

other-worldly and beautiful.

Catch Hell Blues

the majestic white bombast stripes strut

I'm Slowly Turning Into You

Let's pause for a little rock opera, shall we?

Rag And Bone & Effect And Cause

give us a smile, love.

oh nickypaws

Got the vinyl just now. Bee-yoo-tee-full packaging and sound.

When White Stripes' music shows the capacity to be as challenging, visionary and cutting edge as Wire's, and especially when their lyrics achieve even 25% of the outright mindfuck weirdness of Wire's, then we can compare them. Until then, I just don't get it. WS are quite talented and I like the fact that they tend to take random snippets of musical styles of the past and sew them into a nice quilt of modernity. But at the end of the day, they are a pimple on Wire's ass as far as pushing boundaries and confounding expectations, which is what I believe "art rock" - if it has a firm definition - is and should be.

GOOD NIGHT

I see the Wire thing, but I don't know why it has to be Wire instead of say, John Oswald or any other artist who's re-assembling previous musics.

xxpost - agreed. The White Stripes are not representatives of "art rock" in the way I percive that term. What I like about them, is their ability reach a broad audience, by coupling well-established rock and blues elements with those of other genres. They do theirs to help rock evolve, maybe not in the radically experimental sense, but in introducing new ideas to the public (and having them accepted). It's that balance between catchiness and innovation, which allows them into the top of the charts, that makes them so special to me.

I enjoyed this more on first listen than I have any White Stripes album since White Blood Cells. Rag & Bone brought me out into a broad grin and everything from then on is fantastic. First half not bad too.

Also...

CON-QUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEST!

more rocking please.

less experimentation.

i ordered my vinyl copy today.

i hope i get a slipmat in mine.

CON-QUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEST!

haha, OTM!

I found the "art project" article for everyone:

Usually described as minimalism or primitivism, the aesthetic of the White Stripes is also a kind of formalism, in that they have always made themselves work within a set of carefully defined structures that matter more than their contents. They are obsessed with form, as well as with the dissembling of forms into smaller, essential units: a couple of instruments, a few chords, three colors. "The band is so special and so boxed in, and there are so many limitations," Jack White told the Ottawa Citizen a few years ago. "It's such an art project, in one sense.... I think eventually it's going to burn itself out. It can only go so far."

Two years later, we have, in Get Behind Me Satan, White's manifesto for survival: an album that attempts to retain the specialness of the White Stripes by keeping the box, retaining the limitations, and changing only what is inside. The White Stripes still fetishize the past--Satan sounds as if it were recorded in Sun Studios after Elvis's sessions, and the CD booklet has a staged black-and-white photo of Meg and Jack White as members of a rockabilly band that could have been in Memphis in 1954. They still play all the instruments themselves, with Jack handling most of the creative work, and nearly all their songs are still variations on the same three models: electric blues, country blues, and children's music. Now they're doing so with acoustic instruments.

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050725&s=hajdu072505

I enjoy this record so far. Fun and loud and kinda touching sometimes.

"Why don't they just start playing stadiums already?"

hope they dont

I find this 300mph Torrential Outpour Blues track sounds really really like a White Stripes version of a Swell song.. Umm.. must listen to rest of album

<i>Got the vinyl just now. Bee-yoo-tee-full packaging and sound.

-- Davey D, Wednesday, June 20, 2007 5:55 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Link</i>

how much is the vinyl?

ooh vinyl must have

picked this up after work yesterday. The album is great, but I feel a slight let-down coming after 'Get Behind Me Satan', which is their best album. this album doesn't have the range of moods and sounds, it's back to full-bore rock more or less. ha the "Rag and Bone" music sounds like "Fools" by Van Halen.

store here had the vinyl for $32.98 ... um, no thanks.

wtf is up with all these 50 minute album vinyl editions being double LPs .. the Wilco album is the same way. like, the *only* bad thing about vinyl is switching sides. the White Stripes album is 48 minutes and they make the vinyl a double? that's annoying.

i got an email back from my local record store and it was priced the same...it's on 180 gram vinyl, which is heavier and more expensive...also as far as the double record thing goes, the more minutes you cram on a record, the shallower/narrower the grooves are which affects the sound quality, i think they recommend like 15 min. per side max, but i think you CAN do like 25-ish if you really push it....so i'd imagine it's a quality thing.

yeah, I unnerstand about the grooves (wasn't born yesterday) but I still think it's bogus for a 48 minute album. HI LET ME CHANGE SIDES EVERY TWELVE MINUTS

Xpost

M@tt, I got mine (here in PDX) for 22 bucks. Pricey but worth it.

Yeah, switching sides so often is annoying, but I think it's worth it for the sound quality benefits. I mean, that's why we buy the clunky stuff, right?

side one of the first Pretenders lp is like 23 minutes long and it sounds great!

That double LP thing is a drag, 'cause listening to it I'm struck by how clearly this is a two-sided album.

Side One = Icky -> St. Andrews (aka Led Zep III, side 2)
Side Two = Cream Soda -> Effect & Cause (aka Led Zep II, side 2)

And it's great sequencing. It's rare these days that the hardest hitting stuff gets saved for the second half.

I only made it through five tracks so far, but it's pretty dull so far (and the lyrics to the second song - "ur a ten-year old" or whatever - were just awful.

the first three albums were so catchy, even had some swing to them and now it's just thud-thud-thud + awful lyrics.

Miccio's "Violent Femmes playing Zep (and Stones, I'd add)" still makes more sense to me than any of the comparisons upthread. Haven't heard the new album though but am looking forward.

haven't heard anything except the single...but just checked out You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told) - goddam awesome! Totally BAD COMPANY JAMZ!

actually i'm wondering if the main chord change is identical to "Shooting Star"

they just make single albums into double vinyl pressings so collectors (the only ppl still buying vinyl really) like me cum all over themselves.

xpost, re: You Don't Know What Love Is

Hunh, I've been thinking it borrows from "Hey Hey What Can I Do" and that "Signs" song.

"The album is great, but I feel a slight let-down coming after 'Get Behind Me Satan', which is their best album"

I feel a letdown due to the fact that you actually think that is their best album, but each to their own.

re: You Don't Know What Love Is

I keep singing Let It Be Over the chorus..

whisper words of wisdom, let it be, let it be

its very let it be.

Village Voice first calls it total crap, then gives second opinion:

Fell Out of Love With a Band, by Nate Cavalieri

While absorbing the Blueshammer ersatz and pheromone-scented metallurgy of Icky Thump, the White Stripes' sixth record, it's hard not to long for the candy-striped sibs who once sat in that little room, working on something good. Remember them? Way back before the supermodel weddings, Nashville mansions, and sundry side projects? Just Jack on guitar and Meg on drums. So what if she played like a paste-addled fourth-grader? All that stuff about falling in love with a girl, going to Wichita, and seeing rats on the doorstep was as straightforward and vibrant as the wardrobe. Jack himself certainly remembers—on Thump's "Little Cream Soda," he lays aside the thrasher riffs for a second to recall the days when "a wooden box and an alley full of rocks was all I had to care about," only to toss off the sentiment with a dismissive snarl: "Oh well."
"Oh well"? Oh well, the affecting style that made them the most imaginative revivalists of their generation has been replaced by half-assed and half-hearted prog rock. Oh well, the pair of blues tunes here ("300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues" and "Catch Hell Blues") have such an awkward gait they actually feel like they're played by obligated divorcees. Oh well, it sounds like Jack wrote these songs in five minutes and Meg learned them in three. Oh well, the mere fact of being the White Stripes has spoiled the very thing that once made them saviors.

But unless they're saving the army of Candy Children from a deficiency of Bad Company, tunes like "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do What You're Told)" and "Effect & Cause" don't reinvent the wheel so much as hastily retread it. Owing much to young Ozzy ("Icky Thump"), old Ozzy ("Little Cream Soda"), and Humble Pie ("I'm Slowly Turning Into You"), the rest of Thump 's character seems just as lazily borrowed. What's worse, the scraps of originality—the bullfighting, trumpet-backed fanfare of "Conquest" and the two-part bagpipe jig "Prickly Thorn, but Sweetly Worn/St. Andrew (The Battle Is in the Air)"—are simply absurd.

Which leaves "Rag and Bone," a half-song/half-skit wherein Meg and Jack talk about ransacking a vast, cluttered room in a sprawling mansion. Jack admits the motive ("Make some money out of 'em, at least!"); "This fits me perfect," Meg answers in a greedy whisper. They don't notice that they're still standing in the same little room they once built, but it's just become too icky to recognize. Oh well.

Some of Us Really Like Icky Thump, by Tom Breihan

God knows I have more baggage with Jack White than I do with practically any other working musician. His whole man-out-of-time schtick has always bugged the fuck out of me, the way he portrays himself as this anachronistic drifter who doesn't understand emails and TVs and cell-phones, who wouldn't mind totally abolishing the internet even if it had everything to do with his rise to fame. And then of course there was the time where I spent twelve-hour day in precarious fourteen-inch shoe-lifts so that I could make a two-second appearance in his band's video; I wrote about it the next day and apparently somehow diluted his carefully-cultivated air of mystery, whereupon he called me "some asshole actor" in an NME interview (only half-right!). But I still get all rapturous when I think about the drive back to my house after I bought White Blood Cells: windows down on a rare warm and sunny day in Syracuse, those first three or four utterly perfect songs absolutely rearranging my brain. I loved that album to pieces; it was probably the last time I've heard a young band pull off cliched-for-a-reason classic-rock moves with such supreme panache and confidence. Even though I really liked Elephant and Get Behind Me Satan, I couldn't help feeling a certain sense of dashed expectations. Fame and pressure, it seemed, had gone a long way toward evaporating their sense of starry-eyed playfulness, and even when they were having fun with big-rock stomp-snort, it felt like they were bracketing that fun in quotation marks (see: "Ball and Biscuit"). And so Icky Thump, for me, feels like a revaluation, like the rock-stardom leap I've been hoping they'd make since I first saw the "Fell in Love with a Girl" video on MTV. They sound like they're having fun again: making weird and sometimes deeply annoying noises, turning songs halfway into skits, pushing their self-imposed limitations as far as they'll go, but still remembering to write some fucking amazing songs. I was not expecting to hear a great album from the White Stripes at this late date, but that's exactly what Icky Thump is.

I sort of get what Nate Cavalieri was saying when, in the pages of this newspaper this week, he basically said that Icky Thump finds the band drawn into the fame echo-chamber, bereft of joy or direction. But "half-assed and half-hearted prog rock?" I don't know, dude. Icky Thump definitely has a lot of weird noises, and at least a few of those weird noises are pretty ill-advised. Jack has apparently bought some new effects-pedal that makes his guitar (or maybe his keyboard; they sound almost exactly the same sometimes) sound like a cat being strangled, and he lays that trebly shred-noise on way too thick sometimes. The unhinged distorto-shredding on the first-single title-track isn't particularly satisfying; there's a moment about 2:03 into the song where it sounds almost exactly like Lightning Bolt except with totally rudimentary drumming, which isn't a great look. I would've much preferred if they'd opened things up with a statement-of-intent like "Seven Nation Army," which is as perfect a marriage of arena-rock and disco as we've heard since Billy Squier's "The Stroke" or Ace Frehley's "New York Groove." But the White Stripes don't need that first single to establish themselves; they've already done it, and they can afford to fuck around a bit now. God knows I'd rather get a slice of day-glo noise from them than hear them go Nickelback or something. And after "Icky Thump," the album immediately slides into the deeply satisfying choogle-thud banger "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do What You're Told)," which, with a slightly different arrangement, could've been a Bob Seger greatest-hits track (that's a compliment). "You Don't Know What Love Is" is one of maybe eight songs on Icky Thump that keep the hooks coming in total classic-rock overload form: overbearing swagger, dickish lyrics, gargantuan riffs. "Conquest" is a Patti Page cover, but you'd never know it from the screaming fake-mariachi horns and riotous fuzzed-out guitars. "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn" works in bagpipes and mandolins but somehow avoids sounding anything like a folk song. "Rag & Bone" is a neat little song-skit analogy about stealing old junk and turning it into gold, but the central riff is straight-up ZZ Top. "A Martyr for My Love for You" builds beautifully from a sinister simmer to a furiously cathartic chorus. I'm not as crazy about the pounding garage-rock songs where Jack really overdoses on guitar-noise, but even those songs seem necessary for pacing; they allow the band to space out the surging melodies for maximum impact. The one big misstep is "St. Andrew (The Battle is in the Air)," were the guitars and bagpipes and drums all totally ignore each other while Meg goes off on a creepy spoken-word rant. It's borderline unlistenable, and it seems to be there just to remind us how weird this band is, which, I don't know, maybe they needed to do.

I've got this theory that there are two basic ways that indie-rock bands can interpolate classic-rock tricks. There's the smirky and tongue-in-cheek thing where they'll pick up a few bits of bluesy choogle but use them with a sort of jokey distance, purposefully half-assing them; that's what Blitzen Trapper does on their new piece-of-shit album. And then there's the Meat Puppets thing: absorbing these sounds but marrying them to your own sensibilities, making adjustments for whatever drugs you're enjoying, twisting them around and making them weirder. The White Stripes are somewhere between an indie-rock band appropriating classic-rock sounds and an actual classic-rock band; they are, after all, headlining Madison Square Garden next month. And on Icky Thump, they really make their own innate weirdness work with their enormous crunch. Jack White's lyrics here are more impenetrable than they've ever been, and they're also better. "Little Cream Soda" seems to be a classic example of his all-consuming nostalgia for a time that probably never existed, but he delivers his lines in such a creepy, opaque yowl that they turn out fascinatingly evil and wrong. He never lets us know who he's turning into on "I'm Slowly Turning Into You" (his dad?) but when he accepts and celebrates that fate on the third verse, he makes it into a triumphant moment. On "Effect and Cause," he's practically an alien, totally flummoxed and frustrated at humans and their illogical forms of interaction. I wrote yesterday that Kanye West is the only guy working who takes pop stardom seriously. Well, Jack White apparently is the only guy working right now who takes rock stardom seriously, and that's a different thing. He's totally determined to drag all of us into his squirming, feverish brain-space, and he's willing to write some amazing songs if that's what it takes to get us there. Icky Thump makes his universe sound like a fun place to be.

All you need to know
can be shown in the writing
styles of these pieces

my thoughts exactly. just so ugh.