Odds and Ends
Icky Thump Preview
Featuring: The White Stripes
Written by: Al Cottrill
Published: May 14th '07
Icky Thump is certainly another step forward for The White Stripes. Cherry-picking from a century of the nation’s musical genres, Icky Thump is a crush of styles, each interpreted through The White Stripes distinctive lens. It’s delta-blues, desert-rock, thrash metal; full of styles that are uniquely, identifiably American. It’s a powerful patriotism, aurally as if the British invasion never happened, and broad reaching in its reference to the music of the oppressed, angry and dispossessed.
Almost every song on Icky Thump deals with turmoil of some description: betrayal, desertion, and of course, the blues. When Jack’s not lamenting his own pitiful state, he’s preaching at others to improve theirs. In a major shift from Get Behind Me Satan, there are no songs based around piano, the guitar focus that replaces it instilling the album with a masculine tone, only helped by its focus on the blues. The poverty (and inequality) this genre is rooted in is also referenced, and combines with the rebellion and power of metal to provide Icky Thump with its dissonant feel. It is a blues record, no doubt, but it carries in it half a century’s influence of the many styles that grew out of this genre. The White Stripes have been here before, looking to Robert Johnson et al for guidance, and Icky Thump is a lot closer to De Stijl than Elephant or Get Behind Me Satan.
Unlike ‘Blue Orchid’ to Get Behind Me Satan, ‘Icky Thump’ is a fair appraisal of the album’s content. The single’s angry, biting edge (that you’ve no doubt heard) carries through the album, here Jack acting as preacher, addressing America’s hypocrisy and complacency in his direct address to “White America”. It also contains the first of many guitar solos included on the album, and not the most brutal either.
Following on with one of the more conventional songs on the record, ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You’re Told)’ is the sound of Jack’s version of American country bar-rock, his distinctive delivery twisted into a country twang. It is a fuller sound than on previous albums, as Jack dispenses the hard-love from behind the chicken-wire: “You just keep repeating/Those empty-eyed ‘I love you’s’/And until you see you deserve better/I’m gonna lay right into you”. It is still country, but without a cringe, the White Stripes throwing in trademark descending chord progressions, similar to ‘Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground’ and retaining the rough-edges that have become their calling-card. Like the rest of their albums, there are a few conventional, mainstream-friendly tracks that keep The White Stripes’ albums entrenched on the radio, while allowing them to experiment around them. This is one of those.
Continuing their genre experimentation, ‘300MPH Torrential Outpour Blues’ sees The White Stripes trialing surf-rock, The Cruel Sea the closest approximation to the sound. It’s all about Jack though, with Meg taking a backseat here as on much of the record. Her rhythmic drumming provides a simple spine for the Jack’s initial surf-rock-turned-in-on-itself guitar, before another genre switch into finger-picking blues. Sandwiched between this and the rough, unwavering guitar and bitterness of ‘Bone Broke’ is the bizarre ‘Conquest’– the album’s novelty song. Imagine a Mariachi metal band tearing into Morricone’s The Good, The Bad and the Ugly theme and you’ve got it; duelling guitar and trumpet the main drawcard. Another candidate for strangest song on the album is ‘Rag And Bone’, Jack and Meg trading dialogue in full hick mode, playfully acting as a pair of ‘rag and bone’ traders. It’s surprisingly funny (who would have thought Jack had a sense of humour) –“Meg, look at this place/It’s like a maaansion/Look at all this stuff”– and is a welcome break from the pessimism of the rest of the album; the jumping '50’s rock is the reason it works.
Another hit, ‘A Martyr For My Love For You’ is ‘My Doorbell’s shaking strut re-imagined, with a touch of ‘Take Take Take’ thrown in. It is melodic, head-nodding rock following its desert-rock intro. From there, guitars build around a stomping, swinging organ; the chorus upbeat despite the songs content: “I’m walking away from you/It probably don’t make much sense to you/But I’m trying to save you/From all of the things I’ll probably say and do”. It is the catchiest song on the album, and with ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You’re Told)’, the most radio-friendly production.
Although threatening it for a while now, Icky Thump finally sees the evolution of The White Stripes’ sound into one resembling a full band. Despite remaining a duo, the album is packed with instrumentation. The Scottish jig of ‘Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn’ sees all this genre's elements included: banjo, fiddle, tambourine and bagpipe. The ‘Li-De-Li-De-Yo’s” are followed with faux-traditional lyrics: “Well the hills are pretty and rolling/But the thorn is sharp and swollen/And the man has a beautiful whistle/But he wears a prickly thistle." Funnily enough, it works without becoming too saccharine or coy. It segues into ‘St Andrew (This Battle Is in the Air)’, the album’s intermission, and a cut and paste reprise of the previous songs instrumental themes. The bagpipes are prominent, sliced and diced to form a stormy backing for Meg’s prayer to St. Andrew, patron saint of Scotland.
Jolting across genres again, ‘Little Cream Soda’ is as metal as The White Stripes will ever be. switching from bleak metal into swamp-rock, reeking of bitterness and betrayal, as Jack rants wild-eyed about being deserted by God: “Now my mind is filled with rubber tyres and forest fires and whether I’m a liar/And lots of other situations/Where I don’t know what to do/At which time God screams to me/There’s nothing left for me to tell you/Oh well, oh well, oh well, oh well”. It is old-style White Stripes heavy rock.
Continuing the angry tone, Jack recalls the devil’s crossroad deals on ‘Catch Hell Blues’ as God’s avenger, punishing the wicked with his slide guitar: “If you’re giving cheek and lying to yourself/You’re gonna catch hell/If you’re testing God/Lying to his face/You’re gonna catch hell”. Technically brilliant, he struts, spouting challenges among the instrumentation –“Tricky, tricky” and “Try and catch me”– before tearing into solos, slide-guitar screaming fire and brimstone blues. If ‘A Martyr For My Love For You’ was Jack’s nervous masculinity, he reclaims it here with his phallic display of guitar skills. The album’s contrasts continue, abruptly switching into ‘Effects And Cause’, a song far nearer The White Stripes previous gentler material. It’s more blues, but with a country slant, Jack’s low-slung guitar backed by Meg’s clattering drums. Again, Jack’s tacked a country whine onto the back end of his delivery. Meg is far more prominent here, and its reflected in the reversion to their ‘twee’ sound, Jack playing a broken-hearted, frustrated and somewhat pathetic man: “You can’t just take the effect and make it the cause”.
Despite Meg White’s vocal appearances on the album, it certainly feels like Jack’s record. Her cameos on ‘St Andrew (This Battle Is in the Air)’, ‘Rag and Bone’ and ‘I’m Slowly Turning Into You’ are only as characters, simply playing bit-parts in Jack’s master plan. With the fuller sound of this album, her drumming also takes a back seat. When The White Stripes were just guitar, drums and vocals, she played a major role, but as their sound grows, her role is inversely diminished. While this is a natural evolution from their stripped sound, there is more than just her lack of involvement contributing to the album’s masculine feel. Gone is the twee sound of previous records, the childish play and gentle melodies replaced with vicious guitar, balls-out rock and plenty of the blues; the overall feel one of Jack’s influences. Where ‘Passive Manipulation’ showed what it would be like with Meg singing Jack’s parts, it is hard to imagine her doing the same on this album.
While one listen is not nearly enough time to form a full opinion of this Icky Thump, it is certainly long enough to garner a feel for the album’s overall themes. It reeks of dissonance and turmoil, a combination of The White Stripes returning to their roots and a broad, forward-looking experimentation. Their rock veers through just about every American-slanting sub-genre prefix: country-, surf-, desert-, swamp-, metal-, and obviously many forms of the blues. Despite this, and due to their obvious talents, Icky Thump is surprisingly coherent, and contains as many obvious singles as the last two albums.
Tracklist:
01 Icky Thump
02 You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do as You're Told)
03 300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues
04 Conquest
05 Bone Broke
06 Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn
07 St. Andrew (This Battle Is in the Air)
08 Little Cream Soda
09 Rag and Bone
10 I'm Slowly Turning Into You
11 A Martyr for My Love for You
12 Catch Hell Blues
13 Effect and Cause
