The White Stripes
Issue #32
Icky Thump
By Katie Hasty
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
With every White Stripes record, it becomes more and more apparent that Jack and Meg are totally incapable of making the same album twice. With the duo’s sixth full-length, Icky Thump, it’s easy to pick out what’s missing, but even harder to gather the dozens of pinpoints that make it special and affecting.
Gone are the piano-based melodies that dominated 2005’s Get Behind Me Satan, with Jack White’s warm yowl doing its best imitation of the lines with staccato-sweet effect. Thankfully missing is a song Meg sings herself, though her bizarrely childish peep makes cameos on “St. Andrew” and the silly, weirdly self-conscious “Rag and Bone.” The tone isn’t upbeat so much as it is merely bursting with energy, whether in the dark prose of “300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues” or four-on-the-floor stomp of “Little Cream Soda.” In the mischievous tango “Conquest” (written by 1950s songwriter Corky Robbins), Jack describes a relational role-reversal: “The hunted became the huntress / The hunter became the prey... / She with all her female guile / Led him helpless down the aisle.”
Storytelling hour continues in “A Martyr For My Love For You,” where the narrator describes his resistance to falling in love with his underaged subject, ultimately walking away: “I thought I sounded sweet but sure enough / In a gruff faint voice, I heard myself speak... / We might start to kiss / But I feel like I can’t go through with this.” The simple rhyme schemes get a little tiresome on closer “Effect and Cause,” which lazily squares off contraption/traction/action/reaction/satisfaction. However, the song redeems itself in its acoustic front-porch, low-key nature, the only one of its kind on the record.
Another one-off is the pair’s attempt at a Scottish reel of sorts on “Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn,” the thorn that makes this sore thumb e’er painful. The track seems to be conceived of whim, or of admiration for Celtic music, but Jack’s “li de li de li oh oh”s would be better left to the li de li de b-sides. The bagpipes trail off into the aforementioned “St. Andrew,” a weird blur with mystical spoken-word, a strange but affective segue into stand-out “Little Cream Soda.” The brilliant, rambling, and paranoid character of the song feels true, a tiny insight into Jack’s very private and strange world. “Now my mind is filled with rubber tires / And forest fires / What to do at which time God screams to me / ‘There’s nothing left for me to tell you,’” he sings.
The duo’s garage-blues origins still make a consistent appearance throughout Icky Thump, even when they’re veiled with a wall of synths, like on the set’s title track. Jack’s inner-Axl howls over big arena-rock riffs, making even the la-la-la’s drip with bad-assery. “I’m Slowly Turning Into You” starts out cold with a repeating organ and drum riff until around the one-minute mark, where the bubble turns into a boil, the payoff highlighted with an acid-rock guitar solo. “Catch Hell Blues” is a straight-forward, but rewarding track, allowing in some sloppiness that could be heard on the White Stripes’ earliest records.
Overall, it would benefit in approaching Icky Thump not as an album that lacks what the Stripes’ previous efforts had, but brimming with more new ideas than ever. While some tracks are hit-and-miss, the group has armed itself with exciting new weaponry, their traditional red and white taking on very new hues.
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