White Stripes
White Blood Cells
[Sympathy for the Record Industry]
Rating: 9.0
It's been a long time since I've wanted to hear an album every day, let alone
more than once a day. Sure, to make these review deadlines, I often have to
listen to a record daily, but in so many cases, it's a chore. That's not
a problem with White Blood Cells. In fact, the problem now is finding
time for the next album to review; all I want to do is listen to the White
Stripes. I've got it taped for my walkman in the classic cassette format--
it fits easily onto Side A of my 90-minute Maxell. I keep wasting precious
battery power fast-forwarding through Side B so I can get back to White
Blood Cells.
I love the rock and roll. There's always someone new coming along, taking
that heavily rooted sound-- the music of the Gods-- and making the old beast
sing anew. It's Christ and Prometheus, eternally dying and rising again.
Jack and Meg White summon the Holy Spirit and channel it through 16 perfectly
concise songs of longing, with dirty, distorted electric guitar cranked to
maximum amplification, crashing, bruised drums, and little else. They don't
innovate rock; they embody it. And whatever past form of the genre White
Blood Cells invokes has been given a makeover and set loose to strut the
lower east side's back alleys in its new clothes. Red and white clothes.
(The Stripes could stand to vary the color schemes of their album covers.)
There's no denying that the White Stripes fall within the confines of the
garage rock band. Their music is simple, stripped down and it howls the
blues. But despite its simplicity, there's something here that goes so much
deeper. Jack White's mangled guitar screams like a rabid catfight, its
strings massacred to the point of snapping. Meg White's kit is bashed with
such force you'd imagine her as some kind of incredible hulk, though in
photos, she appears the prototypical indie girl-- waifish, with pigtails and
a nasty smirk. Yet she whips all of her 98 pounds into a tornadic fury like
E. Honda's hundred-hand slap.
Occasionally, Jack tosses an organ into the mix, or bangs on a piano like the
Stones' Ian Stewart. But for the most part, White Blood Cells is
instrumentally sparse, with only a guitar and drums. The last time I recall
such a dense sound being wrung from rock's bare essentials was on Liz Phair's
similarly Stones-inspired Exile in Guyville, though this record
explores much raunchier sonic textures; rather than Phair's restrained but
biting wit, Jack White opts to lay it all on the line, the unfiltered cynicism
of an intelligent mind sent blaring through 1000 hZ of raw aggression.
White Blood Cells surges with classic rock's grittier moments, stomping
around like the MC5 and, on the instrumental "Aluminum," Sabbath. The guitar
echoes the second half of Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps. But Jack's
vocals are pure indie rock-- bratty and unashamedly so-- and in his upper
register, his voice yowls and cracks with pissed adolescence.
Virtually all of these songs address a distanced lover. Sometimes he's coming
home to see her, and other times she's done him some permanent wrong. The
lyrics are succinct and direct, and poetic like an aged bluesman. On "Dead
Leaves and the Dirty Ground," he sings: "If you can hear a piano fall, you
can hear me coming down the hall/ If I could just hear your pretty voice,
I don't think I'd need to see at all." He concludes the song with, "Any man
with a microphone can tell you what he loves the most/ And you know why you
love at all if you're thinking of the Holy Ghost."
On the country hootenanny "Hotel Yorba," the Stripes reflect the grit of
early Railroad Jerk-- a glee-filled boogie with Jack's voice breaking and
whooping, almost on the verge of a yodel. "Fell in Love with a Girl" is
frenzied and rollicking (one of the best on the album), complete with
Yardbirds-type "ahhaa's" and a joi de vivre tempered by the admission
that trouble is sure to follow: "My left brain knows that all love is
fleeting."
Indeed, many of the songs admit that the love is lost. On "The Union Forever,"
Jack White mourns, "It can't be love/ Because there is no love." The song is
a riff on Citizen Kane, including a strange breakdown with sampled
dialogue from the film. Here, the White Stripes are the most experimental
they get, which is to say "not very," though the song reminds me of the ragged
power of Royal Trux without the pointless artiness. Certainly, it would be
nice to hear the White Stripes take this music in a new direction, but this
band is all about the songs, and the songs are good enough to stand alone,
sans-flashy effects and tape editing.
"The Same Boy You've Always Known" is the track I'm calling a high point
today. For a ballad, it rocks harder than most bands' hard-rockers, yet it
wrenches in its emotional impact. Jack White repeats certain key lines,
straining his voice to impart meaning and feeling. Again, the state of the
relationship in question is uncertain. The song ends uncommitted and terribly
sad with, "If there's anything good about me/ I'm the only one who knows."
How many bands have failed with entire albums of moroseness to only express
the alienation of those two lines?
The closest thing to a dud on this record is "We're Going to Be Friends," a
gentle, nostalgic ditty of innocent love and childhood. It's a little too
pleasant, lacking any of the fear and confusion of those pre-double-digit
years, but its softness gives the record's midpoint some time to inhale
before another six exhalations of fire.
Finally, at the close of the album, Jack sits alone at the piano for "This
Protector." Though its message is vague, there are implications of religion
and loss: "You thought you heard a sound/ There's no one else around/ 300
people out in West Virginia/ Have no idea of all these thoughts that lie
within you/ But now... now... now, now, now, NOW!" Now what? It's the
floating resonance of the moment, the intensity of the feeling, that gives
these words meaning.
White Blood Cells doesn't veer far from the formula of past White
Stripes records; all are tense, sparse and jagged. But it's here that they've
finally come into their own, where Jack and Meg White finally seem not only
comfortable with the path they've chosen, but practiced, precise and able to
convey the deepest sentiment in a single bound. It's hard to know at this
point in the game where they'll head from here, but what matters is right now.
And right now, I want to listen to this album again.
-Dan Kilian & Ryan Schreiber