On Icky Thump, Jack White embraces weirdness as if it were a kind of truth. There are bizarre excursions into what sounds like White’s idea of English folk (Icky Thump was recorded in London and, on the sleeve, Jack and Meg pose as East End pearly king and queen); on a surreal spoken word number, The White Stripes poke, Scooby-Doo style, around a old mansion house. Even the ostensibly ‘straight’ stuff feels feverish and disconnected: the title track is a bluesy jam that sees White simultaneously channeling Hendrix and Zeppelin (obviously). But he also taps paisley shirt psychedelia while, to these ears , trying to sing in the style of a hill-billy Bowie ( at least the lyrics are cogent; ‘Icky Thump’ is a diatribe against redneck intolerance – “Why Americans Want Nothing Better To Do, Why Don’t You Kick Yourself Out/You’re An Emigrant Two”, snarls White).
Ambiguities stalk the album. ‘Bone Broke’, the closest thing to archetypal White Stripes, bounds between a rootsy riffola and gutbucket folk. Structurally the song, in common with the rest of Icky Thump, is all over the place: there are sudden lurches in tempo, middle-eights crash prematurely into a chorus; White’s vocals seem to have shipped in from a different record entirely. However, that’s merely a taster for the strangeness to which it gives way: ‘Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn’ is an English folk ballad transported to the gothic Appalachia of White’s subconscious; ‘ St Andrew’ (This Battle Is In The Air) finds him playing what can only be described as scabrous Bag Pipes: it’s one part Muddy Waters, two parts Sonic Youth.
Jack and Meg’s last LP, Get Behind Me Satan, featured a fantastic cover (Jack dressed as fire and brimstone preacher, Meg, smiling wryly, clasping God's forbidden apple). Musically, though, it had the air of an EP stretched to album length. No such problems bedevil Icky Thump: the record fizzes with ideas. Nevertheless, you wonder whether The White Stripes are trying too hard to prod a simple formula – guitar, drums, inscrutable irony – into a new direction. Icky Thump is freighted with moments of frazzled virtuosity yet may prove excessively outre for most palettes. The next Raconteurs record can’t come soon enough.