Tom Wilson's online emporium of fun

The Odd Couple

There’s something a little funny about the White Stripes, Jack and Meg. Despite being two pale-faced and decidedly odd-looking outsiders, they manage to hang out with Hollywood stars (Jack was dating Renée Zellweger…) and start acting careers (…and made a passable acting debut in Minguella’s Cold Mountain ). Musically, they’re as authentic they come, having recorded their last album on equipment that was older than the both of them, and refusing to use any digital technology. Their usual musical line-up, employing only guitar, voice and drums, graphically indicates their desire to strip rock and roll down to its barest, most basic elements. However, if their musical vision is characterized by an austere Puritanism which equates most advances in music technology in the past twenty-five years as the work of Satan, then their band image is, conversely, full of deception, jokes and more gimmickry than The Spice Girls. The band only dress in red, white and black, pretended to be brother and sister, later pretended to have married and later divorced (something they now deny) and generally give the press the run around with clever rumours and publicity stunts.

A good example is Jacks recent wedding to model Karen Elson, in a ceremony held on a canoe on the Amazon River , presided over by a Shaman priest . Marrying a model using a Brazilian Shaman is the kind of behaviour you’d expect from an 80s Stadium Rock band member, not from a frighteningly sincere lo-fi garage rock outfit from Detroit .

Their latest album, the intriguingly titled ‘Get Behind Me, Satan’, continues to pursue the same ethic that drove their last, widely acclaimed LP, Elephant. While the latter was recorded in London ’s Toe Rag studios, a half-studio / half-museum of vintage equipment, Satan was recorded at Jacks home studio in just two weeks. Ok, so it’s not quite Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks (recorded in just 48 hours in 1968), but it’s still a brave move in a music industry based around producing a saleable product within fixed deadlines. Coldplay, whose greatly anticipated next album comes out at the same time as Satan, actually caused EMIs share price to plummet because the LP wasn’t finished when it should have been. In this context, The White Stripes rather haphazard approach to putting out a record (released very soon after being recorded) is more than refreshing, especially for a group of their size and importance.

Apparently, none of the songs were finished before the pair went into the studio, all of which were composed on "piano, marimba and acoustic guitar". Though I’m not convinced of the utility of the marimba, a kind of wooden xylophone and the national instrument of Guatemala , in songwriting, the general idea that you get from the official press releases to promote the LP is that this represents some kind of huge departure from the White Stripes’ usual musical approach. It’s not.

Though they used around three times as many instruments making Satan as they did for Elephant, what the new album basically offers is more of the same. It’s blues-heavy garage rock. It’s modern day Led Zeppelin plus a bit more folk. It’s even got the obligatory track with Meg singing in her rather endearing ‘I know I can’t sing but don’t you think I sound like Maureen Tucker from the Velvet Underground’ voice.

Admittedly, there’s less of the riff-heavy tracks that stood out on Elephant, but this is more than made up for by the albums first song (and the first single to be released from the album), Blue Orchid. Perfectly capturing the current zeitgeist for rock music squarely aimed at the dancefloor, an explosion of pounding, 4/4 Disco-Punk energy, it’s probably one of their best songs so far. Sadly, Satan never comes close to Blue Orchid from this point onwards. Like Elephant, which shifted 3.5 more than million copies worldwide mostly on the back of the killer indie-dance anthem ‘Seven Nation Army’, it’s Blue Orchid that’ll be moving dancefloors and appearing on adverts for cars and washing powder throughout the summer.

Like the other big albums from Oasis and Coldplay being released at the same time as Get Behind Me Satan, The White Stripes are sticking to what they do best. Fortunately, what the do best doesn’t involve providing the musical equivalent of football terrace anthems for a quasi-hooligan fanbase (Oasis) or making predictable and formulaic epic ballads for irritating students (Coldplay). They just make great, stripped-down rock and roll.