The White Stripes – Icky Thump
Genre: Classic Rock

The White Stripes is a band for people short on time. You know: too busy to make our own coffee in the morning. Really – if a song can’t work as the mindless background track for an iPod commercial, what good is it? The hooks need to be sharp and twisted, the music frenetic and fast-paced. We want to ROCK. Bass guitar? Superfluous! The colors besides red, black and white? Unnecessary. Coldplay? Just a little too confusing when you’re in a rush.

For the impatient music fan, the garage twosome of Meg and Jack White – who are either previously married, siblings, or none of the above – understand this minimalistic mindset. They’re imminently reverential, with multiple congealing musical styles. They are the Cliffs Notes of two entire decades worth of music (that’s the 60s and 70s), all rolled into one easily digestible band; their songs are a nigh cultural whitewash for the MySpace age.

Of course, whether The White Stripes are digestible is up for debate. The most pressing question for anyone who follows music is whether their sixth grunge rock release since 1999 is worth your precious time. The short answer is yes. Icky Thump – the name is a sly reference to an obscure English expression – wisely eschews the dogged fatalism of the mostly ignored Get Behind Me Satan and the starry-eyed immaturity of their debut for a classic rock record. It’s highly caffeinated spook music that ingeniously melds Bob Dylan with Led Zeppelin.

The title track – and first single – is a perfect example. Even though Jack White doesn’t look or act a thing like Robert Plant, he has that same slinky vibe, and the guitar has a boot-stomp boogie feel -- but not quite. Drums start and stop as though they exist as a mere ghost of the electric guitar, with no bass or keys within a hundred miles of the recording studio. Part of the charm of the Stripes is that it’s just this guy playing really good guitar and a drummer who stays out of his way, and perhaps no other song they’ve done makes this quite so obvious.

“You Don’t Know What Love Is…” is equally precocious: it channels The Band, Gram Parsons, Dylan, and Zepp all at the same time. With “300 MPH…”, the Stripes tone down a bit, just like Zeppelin always did on their first three albums. The best song, “Bone Broke,” is a rambling blues rock breakdown, a song that sounds exactly like a classic Rolling Stones B-side. But every song is a catheter to drain all the gunky radio trash from this decade into the toilet. The White Stripes are like a blast from the past. With Icky Thump, we really mean a blast.