The suspicion that The White Stripes are a conceptual prank masquerading as a rock group intensifies with each outing.
For their fifth dispatch, Jack and Meg contort their beaten up, gut-bucket blues into wrenching, subversive shapes. A feral heckle as much as a pop record, it flaunts its weirdness gleefully and capriciously.
Taut, occasionally threadbare, Get Behind Me Satan was written and recorded in less than a fortnight and the hasty gestation appears to have been a goal in itself.
An anti-authoritarian fug hangs thick and smokey around the project, stinging your nostrils, twirling your emotional compass in strange directions.
It is an album which exists largely to prove a point: it is within the gift of any musician to knock out a half decent LP in the metaphorical flutter of an eyelash and those that claim differently are wimps and fakes (Coldplay, can you hear?)
Mercifully, the lesson is delivered with a mocking grin and a rueful wink. Sonically, Get Behind Me Satan comes on like the best joke record ever made. There are marimbas where there should be howling guitars, wistful melodies are suddenly trampled upon by uneasy jerks of rhythm.
The tendency, of course, has been to portray Jack White, who wrote and produced, as a folklorist disguised as a rock star. With Get Behind Me Satan the far more fantastical truth is laid bare – he’s a jester, taking a metaphorical axe to the strictures of his craft.
Nothing on Get Behind Me Satan sounds quite as it should. While the opening squall of 'Blur Orchard' recalls the artful chug of 2003’s Elephant, the track segues abruptly into the sly faux-latino sleaze of 'The Nurse'. Elsewhere, there are violent lurches towards Stax soul and Motown funk and even a cap doffed in the direction of contemporary electro ( 'My Doorbell' peddles the best honky-tonk blues riff Daft Punk never dared pen) .
What Get Behind Me Satan lacks is a surfeit of snarling big rock wig-outs, the staple of earlier White Stripes forays. Where previously Jack White’s playing exuded a red-eyed, spittle-flecked menace, he seems here to have happened upon the delicious potential of subtlety.
No longer does he hack at his instrument, as though bearing witness to a musical exorcism. Instead, he picks deftly, almost gently, a beatific lover emerging from the chrysalis of a backwoods brawler.
His singing too, bears witness to a deepening maturity. White’s voice has ripened into a dusky, wizened croon, redolent of sunsets and yearning rather than brimstone and closing-time punch ups . There’s a rawness to it still, but a strange tenderness as well. The sense of a songwriter stumbling across another side of himself – a brittle, human element – casts a weirdly emphatic shadow over the project.
Get Behind Me Satan is ultimately an artistic folly, an ornery ramble down a cul-de-sac of styles and sounds. Wandering off the map has seldom felt more rewarding. Better the devil you don’t know.