Icky Thump

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Beautifully recorded, and the most sonically bombastic record The White Stripes have made, 'Icky Thump' is a modern rock and roll masterpiece. Including the most guitar solos Jack White has ever recorded to tape, and incorporating horns and bagpipes for the first time, 'Icky Thump' was shockingly the longest the band has ever spent working on a record- three weeks.

'Icky Thump' finds the duo of Jack and Meg White ever-changing, yet still remaining in their "little red box". The album is a sonically thick, modern sounding record which reveals its roots in American folk music at every turn. As the opening notes of the title track kick off the album, the listener knows he/she is in for an untypical-as-typical White Stripes ride.

The explosive title track leads into a downright Country rock meld titled 'You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)' featuring a Hammond church organ blended with hard country guitar picking. Batting third is '300 m.p.h. Torrential Outpour Blues', a baton relay race of just about every blues style of the last hundred years crammed into one song. Meg White uses several stop-start rhythms to connect the disparate styles into one flowing piece of modern blues music.

Once the listener catches their breath from that storm, they’ll need to inhale again as 'Conquest' begins. Once sung by Patti Page in the late fifties, 'Conquest' sees The Stripes' pit-heavy, bass-laden guitar against mariachi trumpet in a blistering nouveau flamenco number. The semi-climax, resting at the top of a mountain-climbed call and response between Mexican trumpeter Regulo Aldama (found in a Nashville Mexican restaurant) and Jack White's fastest solo on record, 'Conquest' is one of the few examples in modern music of these two instruments, usually unheard together, so violently juxtaposed. After that, 'Bone Broke' evokes primal rock n’ roll that could only come from the bottom of the Detroit river, and will firmly satiate lovers of the band’s early 45’s.

The centre of the album revolves around a new inclusion to the White Stripes pantheon: bagpipes. Jack and Meg expose their Scottish ancestry and are clearly right at home recording in the round with bagpiper Jim Drury. 'Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn' sounds like a potential Scottish national anthem, with its lyrical reflection of the national flower of Scotland, the thistle, while its avant-garde cousin, ‘St. Andrew (This Battle Is In The Air)’, kicks off Meg White's first vocal performance on the album, and lyrically reflects a spiritual ascent and a rumination on mortality. 'Little Cream Soda' is introduced to us with a classic “one.. two.. three.. four” yelp from Jack White, and is an absolutely relentless excursion into speed metal and the darkest reverbs of surf. A half-spoken prose lyric narrates this tune and pushes its dynamics to harsh, hairpin turns. Meg White pounds harshly in her thundering classic style, as the rhythm of 'Little Cream Soda' belligerently batters the listeners’ speakers.

'A Martyr For My Love For You' was written partially on the White Stripes' 'Get Behind Me Satan' tour, and finished being written in the studio. 'A Martyr's…' lyrics are centred around a character of timidity and self doubt who hopes his own sacrifices will benefit the girl he’s in love with. After that, we are slowly introduced to the slide guitar epic 'Catch Hell Blues', which showcases some of Jack White’s finest slide guitar playing to date. A sonically large yet earthly and gritty tone is dynamically performed with Meg White’s drums violently accenting each section. Ending the album, 'Effect and Cause' is a lyrical goldmine of hillbilly wisdom, and shows a scorned character in astonished explanation of where he stands. The album closes with the Stripes walking away from the microphone to no doubt return on/in the next revolution.