FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
The White Stripes – Icky Thump
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THERE are several reasons…
PHOTO CREDIT: Autumn De Wilde
why The White Stripes are in this Vinyl Corner. Happily, three of their studio albums are available again on vinyl. Alongside Elephant and Get Behind Me Satan, their final studio album, Icky Thump, is available to own on the format. The fantastic Detroit duo, Jack and Meg White, started life as The White Stripes in 1997. It is twenty-five years since they came onto the scene. On 15th June, it will be fifteen years since Icky Thump was released. I also think Icky Thump is an underrated album. Not put alongside Elephant and White Blood Cells as the best album from The White Stripes, Icky Thump was a fitting farewell. If you have not got Icky Thump on vinyl, now is the perfect time to get a copy! 2005’s Get Behind Me Satan is a phenomenal album but, as it was different to 2003’s Elephant, some fans and critics were not on board. Elephant was recorded in London and has a raw and lo-fi quality. Get Behind Me Satan has a slightly different sound palette (the marimba makes an appearance, for instance) and is not quite as ragged and memorable as Elephant. Get Behind Me Satan sort of harked back to Elephant but, this being The White Stripes, it was another step forward and like nothing they had recorded before. Icky Thump entered the U.K. album chart at number one and debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 with 223,000 copies sold.
Marrying Some of their heaviest songs yet (Little Cream Soda), with Scottish-indebted tracks, Prickly Thorn, but Sweetly Worn and St. Andrew (This Battle Is in the Air), together with the spike and kick of the title track and 300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues, Icky Thump is an eclectic, consistent and fantastic. With incredible production from Jack White, Icky Thump still sounds so alive and nuanced. Critics were impressed by The White Stripes’ quality and back-to-basics approach. Even though their 2007 album is more layered than say, The White Stripes or De Stijl, at its core is great hooks, phenomenal percussion and the kinetic and raw energy of Jack and Meg White at their peak. This is what The A.V. Club said about Icky Thump:
“We now return you to your regularly scheduled White Stripes. After the stylistic detour of Get Behind Me Satan—a good record, if a bit too stubbornly one-note—Jack and Meg White return to form on Icky Thump, an album of crushing riffs and winking bad-boy patter, steeped in blues, country, and the arena-filling mythology of Led Zeppelin. The key to The White Stripes has always been Jack White's persona: part hypester put-on, part sincere shilling for the ecstatic, liberating effect of roots music. Icky Thump adds some wheedling psychedelic organ on the title track, and mystical-sounding bagpipes on the mini-suite "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn"/"St Andrew (The Battle Is In The Air)," but the album's real gimmick is Jack White, revisiting the playful goof familiar to fans of White Stripes songs like "Astro" and "You're Pretty Good Looking (For A Girl)."
There's a lot more chatter on Icky Thump, from Meg White's haunted monologue on "St. Andrew" to Jack's resigned rant on "Little Cream Soda" to the duo's comic give-and-take on the junkman sketch "Rag And Bone." And that swagger extends to the music, with its spontaneous tempo shifts and loud-quiet dynamics, demonstrating The White Stripes' interest in the transient qualities of performance. The heart of this album is in the little fillips at the end of a guitar solo, and Jack White's carnival-barker growl.
The band's in-the-moment approach doesn't always pan out: Icky Thump is marred by a couple of mid-song instrumental vamps that go nowhere, and by a succession of dirge-y songs toward the end. But it's hard not to be just a little in love with an album that includes songs as entertaining as the flamenco-core workout "Conquest" and the cheerfully pissy Faces-style shuffle "Effect And Cause." If nothing else, this record is fun”.
There are more than enough great reviews to select from. I want to include Pitchfork’s take on an album that, sadly, was to be the last from the much-loved The White Stripes:
“The leadoff title track declares this territory nicely, alternating an overdriven, tortured organ with savage guitar jabs, and already proving a better integration of keys and frets than Satan's marimba experiments. "I'm Slowly Turning Into You" blends Wurlitzer verses with fuzz-guitar choruses almost seamlessly; "St. Andrew (The Battle Is in the Air)" finds White facing off against bagpipes (yes, bagpipes) with chainsaw seizures; and on "Conquest", he trades shrieking Casio tones with a trumpeter.
Yet, Icky Thump also treats us to a band that once again seems comfortable with its broken-in sounds, from the reverb-thud hammer of "Little Cream Soda" and the British Invasion 12-bar of "300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues" to the back-porch ditty of "Effect & Cause". Perennially dismissed, Meg White once again puts the lie to the theory that John Bonham like totally made Led Zeppelin bro, squeezing the most from her limited repertoire and unsteady tempo when locking in with Jack on classic Stripes-stomp breakdowns like the one in "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)", where raw talent takes a backseat to chemistry. The duo's effortless dynamic on "Bone Broke" dismisses the garage-rock trend starting to tiresomely re-bubble yet again amongst the indie dregs, showing that world tours haven't taken them too far away from sweaty suburban Detroit house parties.
But unlike most other 10th-time-around blues-rock revivalists, the Stripes don't settle for endlessly rewriting "96 Tears", as the record's two weirdest (and maybe best) cuts prove. "Conquest", with its theatrical vocal and faux-mariachi fanfares, teases a promising revved-up early Scott Walker direction until you realize that it's a meticulous recreation of the Patti Page original. "Rag & Bone" with its spoken-word verses, is practically a thesis statement for a band that loves to write songs about itself, casting Jack and Meg as junk collectors with a way-creepy relationship, prone to amphetamine rambles and big, chunky rock choruses.
If there's a complaint to be registered about Icky Thump, it's that certain aspects of the Stripes' early character appear to have been annexed off: The sweet pop of "You're Pretty Good Lookin' (For a Girl)" would probably be Raconteurs property nowadays, and White's country dalliances (i.e. "Hotel Yorba") are totally absent. Revisiting old territory also carries with it the hazard of backward comparison, and the highest highs of Icky can't quite reach the altitude of the band's breakthrough singles, but some of that inadequacy is tempered by the group's more robust sound-- De Stijl now feels anorexic in a side-by-side taste-test. Whether it was remembering their own advice from "Little Room" or the freedom to write in another mode with the Raconteurs, White's strategy worked its rejuvenating magic, allowing the Stripes to roll back the stone on Icky Thump”.
Coming back on vinyl, go and get a copy of the terrific Icky Thump. An album that still sounds so immediate and full of colour, I have been a fan of it for fifteen years. Jack and Meg always summoned up the very best albums. On Icky Thump, they concoct and deliver…
A holy riot.