#THE WHITE STRIPES ICKY THUMP TORRENT#

It's the one track on the album that will have you swaying and bobbing your head with unabashed glee (this is a good thing, trust us) and further proves that underneath all the grit and grime and nasty blues mutations the White's like to kick a little melodic sweetness with hearts-on-the-sleeve emotional openness from time to time. It's a wonderfully quaint, albeit craggily so, acoustic jig that is as mesmerizing as one can imagine. 'Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn' returns to the lilting Irish folk ballad motif with rolling mandolin and Jack's piercing nasal falsetto. As with 'Conquest,' it's a jarring shift in stylistics that harkens back to the band's garagey glory days. The ragged drama continues on 'Bone Broke,' which is all Jack White singing like he's been gargling left over acid wash (his guitar sounds like it's been soaking in the same mouth rinse, as well) and Meg drumming like she's banging on rusted garbage cans. Drenched in fuzz and Morricone spaghetti western 'ah-ah-ah's' it's the most dissonant number on the album, to be sure. Shuffling the deck is a good thing sometimes, but this dramatic shift breaks the album like feel that had been laid down. While the first three tunes are obviously steeped in '70's arena rock flashback, 'Conquest' ruffles the flow and delivers a strange Mexican horn infected stomp that comes straight out of leftfield and quite frankly disrupts the wonderful flow that Jack and Meg had setup.

#THE WHITE STRIPES ICKY THUMP TORRENT#

However the acoustic lull is just a front for an eventual torrent of squonk and skirl. Torrential Outpour Blues' has the same vibe as many of Zep's classic acoustic blues numbers, you know lilting guitar buffered by electric blasts and high pitched vocal swooning (especially when Jack says 'I have a woman who says she wants to watch when I bath…'- think Zep's 'Hey Hey What Can I Do'). J and M continue to travel down the road of bygone classic rock with the next track, 'You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)' which borrows heavily from bands like Slade, Five Man Electrical Band (the track has a similar melodic cadence as their 1-hit wonder 'Signs'), and of course the ubiquitous Zep (yeah, shoot me for mentioning Plant, Page, Bonham, and John Paul Jones twice now, but while Jack and Meg have often evoked the spirit of the great LZ, it's even more apparent on this release).

The white stripes icky thump