'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. '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. 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.īut 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. 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. 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'. 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.

'I'm Slowly Turning Into You' blends Wurlitzer verses with fuzz-guitar choruses almost seamlessly 'St.

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. The most obvious breaking development is White's instrument sound- its tones are so aggressively tweaked that it's hard to tell whether he's playing a guitar that sounds like a keyboard or a keyboard being played like a guitar (prediction for the next White Stripes album gimmick: keytar). Recorded over what qualifies as a marathon session for the Stripes (a whole three weeks), Icky Thump re-assembles most of the scrap-heap elements that characterized the White Stripes' pre-fame trilogy: grimy garage-blues, a left-field cover, bizarre spoken-word bits, and shameless Zeppelin and Dylan cues.

After the straightforward radio-rock trappings of the Raconteurs, Icky Thump packs an unexpected freshness, even given its back-to-basics premise had it come immediately after Satan, it could have seemed like a cynical, regressive gift to the core fanbase, but following Broken Boy Soldiers, it recaptures a sense of goofy fun and a caustic edge that the duo haven't possessed since White Blood Cells launched them to the A-list. Icky Thump, then, is a bit of a resurrection: Reuniting with Meg gives Jack the opportunity to slip back into sister-lover character, get his weird clothes out of the attic, and return to basement blues.

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