Alright cats, since we’re at the end of the year, we’re going to kick this mess off with a bit of a blog standard, a list! To make it even more standard, we’re going to make it a top albums of 2007 list! Calm yourselves now, SWAT teams are waiting outside for riot prevention purposes. Over the next few days, I’ll be counting down my top 10 albums of 2007, with some bad summaries and some clips thrown in for good measure. Alright ramblers, let’s get ramblin’.
10. The White Stripes – Icky Thump
I’ve been a huge White Stripes fan ever since I found them on an FTP site in the dorms Freshman Year. I had heard “Fell in Love with a Girl” a few times, but it didn’t make much of an impact on me. I’m pretty sure it was “Hotel Yorba” that hooked me in, and I started listening intently. At that point, The White Stripes, De Stijl, and White Blood Cells had been released, with Elephant soon to follow. I worshipped all of them, which made Get Behind Me Satan all the more deflating when I couldn’t get into it. While occasionally rewarding, GBMS never seemed to capture the garage rock/blues/Jack-White-Crazy that made me fall in love with the band. The additional instrumentation (I’ll admit, I didn’t know what the fuck a marimba was) seemed almost gimmicky, and the simplicity of guitar+drums = rock was the most enticing quirk of the band’s created mythology.
So, with that ludicrously long and uninformative intro out of the way, let’s move into the album itself. Icky Thump doesn’t recapture the glory of their first four albums, but it seems like a step in the right direction. The album kicks off with the title track, and explodes with one of Jack White’s most memorable riffs. It also briefly veers political, something the Stripes have mostly avoided up to this point. The rest of the album mixes accessible, almost dancy tracks ("You Don’t Know What Love Is", "Conquest") with some solid dirty rock/blues ("Bone Broke", "Little Cream Soda"). The album gets a little off-track when White gets crazy with the bagpipe in "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn" and "
While not quite a return to peak form, Icky Thump is a step forward from GBMS. With the additional instrumentation on each album, and his Raconteurs side project, Jack White seemed to be drifting into the realm of the obscure. While not necessarily a bad thing, it takes away from what made the Stripes so listenable in the first place. With Icky, White has reclaimed his grit, and let us all know that he is still one of the best songwriters working today.
Essential Tracks: “Icky Thump,” “You Don’t Know What Love Is”, “Bone Broke”, “Effect and Cause”
"Icky Thump"
"You Don't Know What Love Is"
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