Music Forum / Album Reveiw- White Stripes

I read this reveiw which was very well written; thought it was something you guys might want to look at...

A Modern Classic by Mark Willey

I always seem to get just a tad hyperbolic when referring to the White Stripes. It seems as though I can never say enough good things about the band. What can I say? I’m a hopeless fanboy.

Although they transcend the label, Jack and Meg White are the current forerunners of the garage rock movement. The dynamic duo return from 2001’s White Blood Cells with Elephant, an album that stands as their best yet; the album offers nothing as immediately crowd-pleasing or sweet as “Fell in Love With a Girl” or “We’re Going to Be Friends,” but it’s more consistent, exploring disillusionment and rejection with razor-sharp focus. The sunny melodies of songs like “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For A Girl)” (from 2000’s De Stijl) and “Hotel Yorba” (White Blood Cells) give way to smoldering numbers like the hard-nosed blooze-rock of “Ball and Biscuit” and the incendiary “The Hardest Button To Button”

In the liner notes, the album states that it is dedicated to “the death of the sweetheart.” If only girls behaved the way Jack White wanted them to. “There’s No Home For You Here” finds him so frustrated with yet another volatile woman that the trivia of their affair becomes despicable. At times, this stereotyping of women becomes faintly unsavory. But it smells like fiction, especially when the sentiments come couched in such histrionic music. ‘There’s No Home...” takes grisly instrospection and the tune of “Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground” and makes vast melodrama out of them, with multi-tracked choral howls (a definite Queen influence is heard here), theatrical pauses and the kind of shrill, compressed guitar solos that pockmark the whole album.

Within his valve-driven little universe, Jack White is an extravagant drama queen. The group comes close to surpassing ther cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” on their cover of Bacharach & David’s “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself.” White replaces Dusty Springfield’s forlorn grandeur with spluttery exasperation. But when he gives Meg a song to sing, “In The Cold, Cold Night” is unambiguous in its carnality, a calm come-on pitched somewhere between Brenda Lee and Mo Tucker. Perhaps all those apparent flaws of fickleness and duplicity lie in the minds of men, not women.

It’s easy to get lost in the vivid, unstable emotional tangle of Elephant. But consistently, the brilliance of the music acts as a compass. When Jack bitterly resolves to study the rules of attraction on “Black Math,” he does so to juddering garage punk that recasts “Let’s Build A Home” (from De Stijl) in corroded metal. When he practices more dark algebra by comparing his status as his girl’s “third man” to that as his mother’s “seventh son” on “Ball And Biscuit,” he streamlines the epic crunch of Led Zeppelin in the album’s most overt nod to the blues.

That said, the strongest influences on Elephant are the three albums which preceded it. But it’s a heavier album than they’ve made before, less immediately pop-friendly than De Stijl, especially, and with a nasty undercurrent that battles for prominence with Jack’s romantic anxieties. He’s a fabulist and a showman. But he can also voice sweetness and torment with an intensity that most conventionally emotional songwriters would kill for. Critically, he can make you believe in his songs, at the same time as you don’t believe a word of them. This, perhaps, is what great songwriters do.

And Elephant is a great album, one of the best in a long time. The cyclical nature of popular music is such that Rock ‘n’ Roll, real Rock ‘n’ Roll is on its way up after being down for the better part of a decade. The ascension is at hand.

...let me just say this one thing... that man... boy... whatever... has no idea what the fuck he's talking about... and the only accurate portions of the review I read elsewere... barely unchanged... yeah... yeah... yeah...

Hmmmmmmmm...

Fuck you.