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The White
Stripes. Do you love them or hate them? It’s unlikely you
fall in between, and their special brand of defiantly simple lo-fi
air-guitar anthems has earned them as many detractors as fans.
They’ve only recently hit the big time in Britain, making
Elephant a highly important album. Have they delivered the goods? |
The
White Stripes - Elephant
[1] Seven
Nation Army
[2] Black
Math
[3] There's
No Home For You Here
[4] I Just
Don't Know What To Do With Myself
[5] In The
Cold Cold Night
[6] I Want
To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother's Heart
[7] You've
Got Her In Your Pocket
[8] Ball
And Biscuit
[9] The Hardest
Button To Button
[10] Little
Acorns
[11] Hypnotise
[12] The
Air Near My Fingers
[13] Girl,
You Have No Faith In Medicine
[14] Well
It's True That We Love One Another
|
Jack and
Meg White’s latest opus starts badly. In fact, it starts
with the best song they’ve ever done. ‘Seven Nation
Army’ is ominous, throbbing, powerful and irresistibly catchy
all at once, a stormer of a first single and a definite contender
for song of the year. And quite frankly, the rest of Elephant
can’t keep up.
There are
undeniable sparks of brilliance of this record – the driving,
pumping beat of ‘The Hardest Button To Button’, the
infectious rock-out riff of ‘Black Math’, and the
gorgeous simplicity of ‘You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket’.
But the Stripes’ attempt at “pacing” amounts
to little more than clumping the slower, less conventional numbers
in the middle of the album (‘In The Cold Cold Night’
to ‘Little Acorns’, inclusive) and it lags considerably
as a result. And some songs just fall flat on their faces, like
‘Ball And Biscuit’, an excruciatingly dull 7-minuter
about… well, nothing in particular. Nonetheless, there are
far more hits than misses, and even the poor songs have something
going for them. |
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Lyrically
it’s decent, ranging from ‘There’s No Home For
You Here’s endearing bitchiness ("I’ve not really
been looking forward to the performance but there’s a cue
and there’s a question on your face/Fortunately I have come
across an answer which is: go away and do not leave a trace")
to ‘The Air Near My Fingers’’ less-than-inspired
quirkiness ("Life’s so boring/It’s really got me
snoring"). |
"Take all
your problems and rip them apart", sings Jack White in ‘Little
Acorns’. It’s a shame the White Stripes didn’t do
the same with this record. Not because it’s a ‘problem’,
but because it could have done with some tweaking – extending
‘Hypnotise’, for example, and cutting ‘Ball and Biscuit’
off altogether. But despite this, ‘Elephant’ remains by
and large a continuation of the White Stripes' quality. Well worth buying.
4 out of 5
Patrick
Robertson |
