A Week With The White Stripes' "Icky Thump": Day 1
24 July 2007
tell your friends...
Words by David Bevan // Illustration by Ally Trigg
It’s happening again: the Whites are taking over airwaves and air space everywhere, their latest batch of jams having already embedded themselves neatly into still-developing best-of lists, children’s rhymes and playlists piping out of a jukebox near you. It’s not without reason — Icky Thump is armed with a variety of hooks as barbed as they are unavoidable. That it will cement Jack White’s legacy as genre-swirling guitar god several years down the line is as close to certain as certain can be. It’s science.
But for now, the Stripes’ major label debut requires serious digestion. Despite their current ubiquity and the album’s obvious strengths, it seems as though few know what to do with it, how to wrest with it, or what to label it. Some have deemed it experimental, their most inaccessible record to date. Hogwash. Jack loaded this baby up with enough pop phraseologies to sink it, its sonic and lyrical turns as front-heavy as they are addicting.
The first single and raucous opener is testament, with White putting a political spin on a Zeppelin-glazed rumbler as rambunctious and rousing as any he’s ever penned. White’s shots at the immigrant debate are well-calibrated, though with riffs as bruising and slippery as those he’s laid to tape here, it’s tough to feel at first listen if this particular cloud of White-brand brainspray doesn’t pull a muscle right out of the gates. All that commentary is drowned out by sis’s bass-kicks and the mud with which White scuzzies up his all that he whinnies. The White Stripes have had much success with kickstart singles in the past, their first shot from the field dropping almost every time. It rocks so much harder than its verses stick.
Things downshift almost immediately thereafter, with both “You Don’t Know What Love is (You Just Do As You’re Told)” and “300 M.P.H. Torrential Blues” serving as a quick repreive from the sort of aural and cardiovascular battering administered by this here long-player’s titular opener. The former is hopefully a taste of the country-jamz White’s got hoeing down in that candy-striped pipeline of his as you read this. It seems a meaty cut from White’s pastoral voyages with songstress Loretta Lynn and a sign that dude’s change of address attracted even more of his purist energies. He’s got one foot in the garage, one in the roadhouse, and we may all thank him for saving Nashville (and country) soon enough.
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