{"id":631,"date":"2007-06-13T05:06:28","date_gmt":"2007-06-13T09:06:28","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2008-12-15T16:10:31","modified_gmt":"2008-12-15T16:10:31","slug":"minute-by-minute-review-white-stripes-le","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/minute-by-minute-review-white-stripes-le\/","title":{"rendered":"Minute-by-Minute Review: White Stripes, <em>Icky Thump<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/KkO8Zg-WHno?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><br \/>\nHey, hey, hey, look what&#8217;s dropped at Phawker.com, a live, streaming preview of the new White Stripes album, <em><strong>Icky Thump<\/strong><\/em>. So why not reclaim my title of King of Minute-by-Minute Reviews from Mr. Moderator, who recently used my throne to kiss Paul McCartney&#8217;s sagging butt? Nice job, Mod, but this is my turf!<\/p>\n<p><em>Icky Thump<\/em> opens with <strong>&#8220;Icky Thump&#8221;<\/strong>, on which Jack and Meg do their patented Led Zeppelin via T-Rex stomping simplicity routine to perfection. There&#8217;s something slightly dark and mystical about the overdubbed solos, like the band is promising to enter its <em>Presence<\/em> phase, but White sings with too much glee and places his voice too far up front to worry us about leading us down that album&#8217;s black hole. Beside, White Stripes don&#8217;t have a multi-talented bassist to take the wheel during their captain&#8217;s junkie slip.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;You Don&#8217;t Know What Love Is (You Just Do What You&#8217;re Told)&#8221;<\/strong> has a real 1973 AM cock-rock hit feel, like something a heavily mustachioed 1-hit wonder might have struck gold with when I was first noting the interesting differences between boys and girls. So joyous and friendly, like that song &#8220;Signs&#8221; or that song about making the cover of <em>Rolling Stone<\/em>. Get me a K-Tel release featuring this one! Digging it, and digging yet another cool-sounding guitar solo. Fuck all you slow-moving, mandolin-playing bands out there! This is why rock bands entered the studio. The rest of you should set up a stereo mic in an abandoned church.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues&#8221;<\/strong> is a relatively tender change of pace, but even this song packs a snaky rock punch. Oh man, listen to that tiny, volcanic guitar solo! I don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s going on, but I want to listen to it again. Load up another hit, brother. Is this White guy about the last guy on earth who knows what to do with <strong>The Power and Glory of Rock<\/strong>? He&#8217;s so ON, so far, that I&#8217;m finding the elephant in the Hall &#8211; Meg&#8217;s drumming, or lack thereof &#8211; to be no issue whatsoever.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s this song, <strong>&#8220;Conquest&#8221;<\/strong>? Who asked for this mariachi band nonsense on Track 4 of what had been headed for the best album I&#8217;ve heard in ages? Save this crap for a Tarrantino soundtrack!<\/p>\n<p>OK, what&#8217;s next? I like the opening chords of <strong>&#8220;Bone Broke&#8221;<\/strong>! Meg sounds like she&#8217;s going to play a full beat before this song&#8217;s over, or is that a drum machine playing the same timed tom fill that threatens to sound like it was played by a real drummer? Oh hell, this is all beside the point. This song&#8217;s starting to get underway. I&#8217;m liking this sinister verse, but something&#8217;s missing. Maybe this is a rough mix that was leaked to the public? Oh that&#8217;s right, these guys still can&#8217;t pony up for a friggin&#8217; bassist. I&#8217;ll try to be a bigger man and overlook this fact. I know it&#8217;s part of their schtick, like the color-coordinated outfits. <em>Less is more<\/em>, right? God forbid a mustachioed bassist would slide up to the upper registers of his Gibson Firebird bass.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nHere&#8217;s <strong>&#8220;Prickly Thorn, but Sweetly Worn&#8221;<\/strong>, the Led Zep III number, with Hari Krishna percussion and a chanting vocal. I&#8217;m a sucker for this stuff, so I&#8217;ve got no beef with how hokey this kind of song is, in fact, any band with a sense of &#8217;70s pomp and circumstance owes it to themselves to crank out one of these bad boys. Even Humble Pie did a song like this.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;St. Andrew (This Battle Is in the Air)&#8221;<\/strong> features more bagpipe\/Indian mysticism and the spoken vocals of Meg White, I guess (or a sped up Jack). The music&#8217;s cool, but hearing this slight voice makes me miss the former drummer\/wife of Apples in Stereo. That&#8217;s not a compliment.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Little Cream Soda&#8221;<\/strong> is essentially an instrumental with Jack doing the talk-singing routine. This makes three songs in a row that strike me as self-indulgent filler. Come on, man, what happened to the promise of those early &#8217;70s, hard-rockin&#8217; AM radio hits? The candy-ass fun and games of the last few songs don&#8217;t even have the allure of the junky hell of the bad songs on <em>Presence<\/em>. Let&#8217;s get back on track, Jack.<\/p>\n<p>The comeback is up to <strong>&#8220;Rag &amp; Bone&#8221;<\/strong>&#8230;which starts out with hokey &#8220;off-mic&#8221; talk between Jack and Meg. God I hate this shit! It&#8217;s the musical equivalent of comic books. You nerds can have your comic books, your rockabilly hair and tattoos, your horn-rimmed glasses, and all that totally phony hand jive that only works when the 110-pound singer is surrounded by a band like Aerosmith in their prime, a band with a bass player, goddammit! Here&#8217;s more of that hand jive. It&#8217;s 2007, White Stripes, let the kids dig through used bins for ZZ Top albums if they want. I&#8217;m not buying this bubblegum version of that crap.<\/p>\n<p>Meg will surely impress rock critics with her &#8220;restrained&#8221; drumming on <strong>&#8220;I&#8217;m Slowly Turning Into You&#8221;<\/strong>. Likewise, some bookworm will do handstands over the implied identity issues examined in this non-song. Jack White should wake up each morning thanking his maker for his abundance of charisma. To top it off, the guy has a tremendous understanding of how rock records function. A little solo section enters this song long after I&#8217;d completely given up on it that makes for worthwhile listening. Like Zeppelin did, I love how he uses the blues for its artifice. It&#8217;s a much more honorable way to tap into a tradition that&#8217;s not quite our own than any pseudo-blues scholar way we&#8217;re too often used to hearing.<\/p>\n<p>And I guess that&#8217;s the end of this minute-by-minute review. I hope you found it helpful, and I hope it colors your listening experience for years to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hey, hey, hey, look what&#8217;s dropped at Phawker.com, a live, streaming preview of the new White Stripes album, Icky Thump. So why not reclaim my title of King of Minute-by-Minute Reviews from Mr. Moderator, who recently used my throne to kiss Paul McCartney&#8217;s sagging butt? Nice job, Mod, but this is my turf! Icky Thump <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/minute-by-minute-review-white-stripes-le\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[65,95],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}