![]() ![]() There’s also a nicely-struck balance between grit and polish on songs such as ‘30MPH Torrential Outpour Blues’ and standout track ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You’re Told)’, giving the impression of a band having a lot of fun tearing it up in a very expensive studio. It’s not a ‘back to the garage’ undoing of the previous eight years, but marries the stylistic restlessness of ‘Get Behind Me Satan’ with a muscular directness. 2005’s ‘Get Behind Me Satan’, this record’s predecessor, was an impressive departure, but the band clearly yearned to make a racket again, and that’s exactly what they do on ‘Icky Thump’, their most recent album. Inscribed somewhere in rock’s sacred scrolls are the words: “Beware the band that speaks of going ‘back-to-basics’.” The standard translation is something like: “We tried some new things, nobody liked it, we ran out of ideas and now we’re plagiarising our early stuff.” For The White Stripes, it meant anything but that. ![]() The primal, roof-shaking rockers sound tighter, the boundaries are looser and the centre holds together perfectly. Even their cover of country blues singer Blind Willie McTell’s ‘Your Southern Can Is Mine’ sounds like a White Stripes original. What really stands out on ‘De Stijl’ is that The White Stripes are already masters of their own filter, able to pass a range of influences through it and have it all come out sounding like The White Stripes. The songwriting takes a leap forward, too, as evidenced by the utterly charming piano-driven ‘Apple Blossom’ and the ‘Led Zeppelin III’-style ‘I’m Bound To Pack It In’. ![]() ‘De Stijl’ doesn’t mess too much with the formula set out on the band’s debut, refining their garage rock take on stomp and holler blues and finding space here and there to stretch out. Look at it more as the sign of a band that was heading in the right direction, growing in public rather than arriving fully formed. That Jack and Meg’s first two albums are at the bottom of this tree shouldn’t suggest they deserve being considered their ‘worst’. ![]()
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