Planet Jack: Fucking With Critics on Icky Thump

Early last year, when I reviewed the Raconteurs' "Steady as She Goes," I wrote, "If music is the universe, then Jack White gets his own planet." I still feel this way. White is so immersed in music's past, present and future, and holds a great appreciation and understanding for all of its details. And like the most brilliant of musicians, he has found those cracks in the universe, those flaws in the details, and exploited them. He has managed to constantly fuck with structure, chipping away at the boundaries, yet somehow coming back around to rock and roll acceptance. But with the new White Stripes album - Icky Thump - Jack and Meg White achieve something absolutely unprecedented - they have become defiant. That is to say they have managed to completely fluster the critics who once adored them.

Rolling Stone rewarded 2005's Get Behind Me Satan with a glowing five star review. Two years later, Icky Thump deemed a 3 and a half - fantastic for mere mortals, but hardly what you'd expect for a Jack White project. "Jack White is less a songwriter than a sonic architect," writes Robert Christgau. "Compared even with Lil Jon or Avril Lavigne, what his hits have in common isn't anything he stands for. It's instantly enticing musical constructions. On these the new album comes up slightly short." Not so bad. Spin was much harsher. Brian Raftery calls it a "noisy, cranky piece of work. Jack's ever-rueful lyrics raise the sighing cynicism of 2005's Get Behind Me Satan to a roaring snarl, while the music returns to its ferocious slash-and-burn roots, with no shortage of strangled distortion. One can only imagine what the bosses at Warner Bros. thought when they realized that Jack and Meg's major-label debut would be the least fun album of their career."

On the otherhand, the less White-friendly Pitchfork was quite taken. Rob Mitchum writes, "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 is an album baffling in its brilliance. Its influences are obviously from the past, but yet it hardly seems concerned with that past. It doesn't reference previous White Stripes albums nor doesn't try it fall in between ones. The title track is easily the oddest single the band has ever done - with so many starts and stops, virtually no chorus, and a perplexing rap. Certainly not as easy a Stripes album to grasp as the last three, but dig into the details and you may be truly amazed at what you find. White has made an album that is the antithesis of the music blogger culture - not an album that grabs you right away, instead one that haunts you and forces you to find its hooks.

"Conquest"