The White Stripes
Icky Thump
(XL) £11.99
Has any musician had a more dazzling decade than Jack White? Icky Thump marks 10 years of his seething candy-striped blues. Across six great albums, plus a full-blooded side-project, the Raconteurs, White is probably the most consistently electrifying artist of his generation. He has yet to pen a dud - unless you count that damp squib of a Coke ad.
The latest Stripes album title, a play on the Lancastrian exclamation 'Ecky thump!' is, in part, a gasp of surprise at how that time has flown. Onetime l inchpins of the Detroit scene, Jack and Meg moved away - her to LA, him to Nashville - in disgust at parochial in-fighting. Icky Thump was made in a three-week stretch in the Nashville studio where Jack recorded Loretta Lynn's Van Lear Rose.
After the piano and marimba excursions of the Grammy-winning Get Behind Me Satan, Icky Thump returns to riffs with a vengeance. The White Stripes have always channelled the spirit of Led Zeppelin openly, and Page and Bonham 's priapic squealand- thump is in full effect on ferocious tunes such as the title track.
Every Stripes record of late has had an unexpected excursion. Icky Thump finds Jack and Meg paying tribute to their alleged Scottish ancestry with bagpipes. Had Zeppelin holed up in Jimmy Page's Loch Ness house rather than Bron-Yr-Aur, it might have sounded a little like 'Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn'. Its successor, 'St Andrew (This Battle Is in the Air) ', begins on the final note of 'Prickly Thorn' and finds White loosing screes of Arabic guitar, while a childlike Meg gets cosmic on her token lead vocal. The hammy 'Rag and Bone ' aside, the remainder of Icky Thump is sensational. The masterful five-song run at the start is an unadulterated thrill. 'You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)' is a Southern rock tour-de-force. 'Conquest ' is their most astonishing cover version yet, where a mariachi horn and White's guitar vie for first blood. One of the Stripes' most intriguing songs ever, '300 mph Torrential Outpour Blues' ponders White's identity after so many years of poses. His musing is interrupted by volcanic eruptions of guitar that come without any warning. Well, unless you count the last 10 years.
