Heather Phares, All Music Guide

White Blood Cells may have been a reaction to the amount of fame the White Stripes had received up to the point of its release, but, paradoxically, it made full-fledged rock stars out of Jack and Meg White and sold over half a million copies in the process. Despite the White Stripes' ambivalence, fame nevertheless seems to suit them: They just become more accomplished as the attention paid to them increases. Elephant captures this contradiction within the Stripes and their music; it's the first album they've recorded for a major label, and it sounds even more pissed-off, paranoid, and stunning than its predecessor. Darker and more difficult than White Blood Cells, the album offers nothing as immediately crowd-pleasing or sweet as "Fell in Love With a Girl" or "We're Going to Be Friends," but it's more consistent, exploring disillusionment and rejection with razor-sharp focus. Chip-on-the-shoulder anthems like the breathtaking opener, "Seven Nation Army," which is driven by Meg White's explosively minimal drumming, and "The Hardest Button to Button," in which Jack White snarls "Now we're a family!" — one of the best oblique threats since Black Francis sneered "It's educational!" all those years ago — deliver some of the fiercest blues-punk of the White Stripes' career. "There's No Home for You Here" sets a girl's walking papers to a melody reminiscent of "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" (though the result is more sequel than rehash), driving the point home with a wall of layered, Queen-ly harmonies and piercing guitars, while the inspired version of "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself" goes from plaintive to angry in just over a minute, though the charging guitars at the end sound perversely triumphant. At its bruised heart, Elephant portrays love as a power struggle, with chivalry and innocence usually losing out to the power of seduction. "I Want to Be the Boy" tries, unsuccessfully, to charm a girl's mother; "You've Got Her in Your Pocket," a deceptively gentle ballad, reveals the darker side of the Stripes' vulnerability, blurring the line between caring for someone and owning them with some fittingly fluid songwriting.
The battle for control reaches a fever pitch on the "Fell in Love With a Girl"-esque "Hypnotize," which suggests some slightly underhanded ways of winning a girl over before settling for just holding her hand, and on the show-stopping "Ball and Biscuit," seven flat-out seductive minutes of preening, boasting, and amazing guitar prowess that ranks as one the band's most traditionally bluesy (not to mention sexy) songs. Interestingly, Meg's star turn, "In the Cold, Cold Night," is the closest Elephant comes to a truce in this struggle, her kitten-ish voice balancing the song's slinky words and music. While the album is often dark, it's never despairing; moments of wry humor pop up throughout, particularly toward the end. "Little Acorns" begins with a sound clip of Detroit newscaster Mort Crim's Second Thoughts radio show, adding an authentic, if unusual, Motor City feel. It also suggests that Jack White is one of the few vocalists who could make a lyric like "Be like the squirrel" sound cool and even inspiring. Likewise, the showy "Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine" — on which White resembles a garage rock snake-oil salesman — is probably the only song featuring the word "acetaminophen" in its chorus. "It's True That We Love One Another," which features vocals from Holly Golightly as well as Meg White, continues the Stripes' tradition of closing their albums on a lighthearted note. Almost as much fun to analyze as it is to listen to, Elephant overflows with quality — it's full of tight songwriting, sharp, witty lyrics, and judiciously used basses and tumbling keyboard melodies that enhance the band's powerful simplicity (and the excellent "The Air Near My Fingers" features all of these). Crucially, the White Stripes know the difference between fame and success; while they may not be entirely comfortable with their fame, they've succeeded at mixing blues, punk, and garage rock in an electrifying and unique way ever since they were strictly a Detroit phenomenon. On these terms, Elephant is a phenomenal success.

Caroline Butler, Amazon.com

Jokingly referred to as the White Stripes' British album, Elephant is scattered with cultural references that give away the fact it was recorded far from home. Just listen to the lyrics on "Seven Nation Army" ("From the Queen of England to the hounds of Hell") or the album outro, in which someone chips in, "Jolly good, cup of tea?" But while there are new twists here, from Meg White discovering her voice to a tongue-in-cheek threesome with Holly Golightly, Elephant is no great departure for Jack and Meg White. They still push their creativity (and the boundaries of their eight-track) to new heights. Check out the startling, Queen-inspired "There's No Home for You Here," while the deep bass line on "Seven Nation Army" makes it a classic indie dance track. But while some songs fly off into new realms, there's plenty of their trademark straight-up bluesy rock, notably the overtly sexual "Ball and Biscuit." And there's Jack's plaintive, resolutely modest and yet theatrical voice.

David Sprague, Barnes & Noble

Their binary color scheme -- red, white -- and instrumental attack -- guitar, drums -- belie the dazzling array of hues these Detroit natives bring to their wildly popular post-blues-rock. Elephant, the Stripes' fourth long-player, has been trumpeted as a make-or-break deal, since it arrives on the heels of their smash White Blood Cells, and from virtually the first groove of the anthemic "Seven Nation Army," it's clear that they have no intention of buckling under the strain. Whether he's stomping, as on the incendiary "The Air Near My Fingers," or swooning, as on "I Want to Be the Boy" (which continues his string of infectiously innocent pre-adolescent love paeans), Jack White remains intriguingly real, unflaggingly believable. Elephant isn't a huge departure from White Blood Cells; it's more an intensification of that album's M.O., with the noisy songs offering up more noise and the sweet counterpoints a little more sugar. The band's nods to the blues have grown more confident, with icons like Lightnin' Hopkins and Son House used as stepping-stones rather than crutches, a transition they display on the distortion-laced epic "Ball and Biscuit." Making a big noise is but one of the Stripes' strengths, though: The sound and fury they unleash here signifies plenty, particularly on the bitterly careening "Black Math" and the feedback-caressed cover of the Bacharach classic "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself." In keeping with their minimalist aesthetic, the White Stripes recorded Elephant in just a few days, using just a few tracks on an ancient studio board. But the result -- to borrow a line from that credit card campaign -- is absolutely priceless.

The White Stripes: Jack White (vocals, guitar, piano); Meg White (drums). Additional personnel: Holly Golightly (vocals); Mort Crim (spoken vocals). Recorded at Toe-Rag Studios and BBC Maida Vale Studio, London, England in April 2002. ELEPHANT won the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album. The album was also nominated for Album Of The Year. "Seven Nation Army" won for Best Rock Song. The song was also nominated for Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal.

Lo-fi in production and uncompromising in approach, ELEPHANT finds The White Stripes continuing to walk to the beat of their own pomo blues drummer in ignoring the enormous expectations heaped on the follow-up to 2001's smash WHITE BLOOD CELLS. Recorded in two weeks, this outing is packed with loose, soulful, and delightfully unpretentious songs that rage and howl. Jack and Meg White hit the ground running with the chugging shuffle "Seven Nations," with its infectious bass line and thudding cadence. Surprises abound, from the wall of Queen-like harmonies that infuse the choppy, psychedelia-tinged "There's No Room for You Here" or a reading of Burt Bacharach's "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself" bursting at the seams with distorted guitar. Not surprisingly, the blues are never far from the equation, particularly on the heavy stomper "Ball and Biscuit" with its bursts of screaming guitar solos. Equally impressive is Jack White's slide guitar on the pleading "I Want to Be the Boy to Warm Your Mother's Heart" and six-string histrionics on the chugging "Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine" that shakes and shimmies with Stooges-like aggression.

Raoul Hernandez, Austin Chronicle, March 28th, 2003

Phases and Stages

Blind parasites buzz and crawl over the living-earth hide of this Elephant, feeling the back-end millennia's worth of evolution that became this beast: Flat Duo Jets, Doo Rag, JSBX, Fat Possum Records. Simple, primal: bass -- yes, bass -- guitar, and drums. A couple of circus clowns named Jack and Meg. Up flies the freak-flag trumpet call of opener "Seven Nation Army," hacksawed by the distorted down-stroke that follows on "Black Math." Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself" recalls the Stones' "Back Street Girl" getting assaulted by Ziggy's spiders from Mars, not to be confused with the frozen butterflies of Meg's "In the Cold, Cold Night." Jack's lonely Wayne Coyne whine on "I Want to Be the Boy" and "You've Got Her in Your Pocket" gets upended by Elephant's seven-minute headstand, "Ball and Biscuit," which pushes the big echo bash of White Blood Cells' "Expecting" further up Zeppelin Kimbrough's Red Houses of the Unholy. The narco Clash throb of "The Hardest Button to Button," Jack taking a sip from Britt Daniel's spit cup, skids into the J. Geils' "No Anchovies Please" intro to downed power line "Little Acorns." Motor City shakedown "Girl You Have No Faith in Medicine" burns down the hospice. Finally, Holly Golightly tames this Elephant with a closing duet ditty. A baby elephant still, bigger, brighter than its two siblings, but it's in your kitchen, and it ain't leaving anytime soon.

Christopher R. Weingarten, CMJ new Music First, Issue 808, April 7 2003

The fourth release by Jack and Meg White, the most famous sibling/ couple garage-country-bluespunk- Broadway-pop band in the world, is the funeral march for what the duo has dubbed the “death of the sweetheart.” The Starlite twins yearn for love that only exists in Victorian courtship rituals and Daniel Johnston songs, defining their longing through Led Zeppelin II riffs, using vulnerability, JoJo Richman discomfort and envy of grain-workers to stuff their jeans. Jack wants to be “The Boy That Wins Your Mother’s Heart” and Meg is as fragile as a Cat Power Faberge egg crooning, “I know you feel it too/ When my skin turns into glue.” “There’s No Home For You Here” is the sequel to “Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground,” a musical doppelganger that cribs the greasy gutbucket riffs note-for-note, but replaces the embrace of a lover with a neurotic “fuck you” — Jack’s Anticon-esque breakup rap juxtaposed with a show-stopping Queen chorus. With Meg’s perfectly imperfect drumming and Jack’s Detroit wail excavating Jon Spencer or Plant or Willie Dixon, the divinely sloppy and unadorned Elephant is Raw Power with a GED.

Gary Smith, Delusions of Adequacy, April 28th, 2003

These days, when an artist is heaped with praise, hype, and rave reviews, the result is usually quite predictable: the artist, unable to live up to near-impossible expectations, implodes before being crushed by a media backlash. Occasionally, however, a miracle occurs. The White Stripes, despite a constant stream of hype and publicity that's followed them since last year's White Blood Cells, have managed to release a follow-up album that not only meets expectations, it blows them away.

Elephant is good. Really good. It is catchy, fun, and addictive. There is no greater compliment for an album than to have it hog your CD player for days on end while piles of newer discs stack up beside the stereo, unplayed in their shrink wrap.

The first four seconds of the disc are as great an album intro as you'll find, anywhere. The bass line for "Seven Nation Army" will surely sell more copies of Elephant than any brother-sister/husband-wife publicity scandal could ever hope to. Thankfully, the rest of the album is equally as solid. Jack rocks out, 1960s blues style, on tracks like "Ball and a Biscuit" and "Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine." Both tracks are enticing sex and drug glorifications that seem, strangely, almost quaint in a psychedelic devil-worshipping sort of way.

Jack deftly handles a cover of Burt Bacharach's "I Don't Know What to Do with Myself" and makes it fit as comfortably on the album as any other track. Meg White takes lead vocals for "In the Cold, Cold, Night," and her stark, crisp singing is a wonderful shock to the system after the previous feedback-ridden tracks. Elephant ends in a quirky mass of ambiguous love confessions with "Well it's True That We Love One Another," an acoustic ballad that features alternating conversational vocals between Jack, Meg, and guest Holly Golightly.

Sure, the fact that the entire album was performed and recorded on 1960s-era equipment ("No computers were used during the writing, recording, mixing or mastering of this record," says the insert) wins major cool points. So does the continuing use of the red and white theme. The coolness factor becomes irrelevant, however, when the music is this damn good. Elephant is a classic rockin' good time. Crank the bass and enjoy.

Sharon O'Connell, Dotmusic, March 31st, 2003

Apparently overwhelmed by their elevation to the upper echelons of alterno-rock celebrity following the release of their 'White Blood Cells' album, Jack and Meg White have downplayed the arrival of their fourth almost to the point of issuing an apology. It was bound to be no good, they claimed, and would very probably be their last.

This wasn't false modesty on the part of the Detroit duo, but rather the expressed anxiety of artists both bemused that it blew up as it did (it was their third album, after all), and enormously respectful of their muse and their musical forebears. If rapturous response to their records makes them feel uncomfortable, however, the Whites are about to feel damned awkward for some time yet.

'Elephant' sticks to the White Stripes minimalist blue(s)print - thrillingly primitive drumming, near feral fretwork, Jack's awesome yowl - but makes the subtle, yet crucial moves which are the mark of a talent in this for the long haul. Alongside the swampily expressive likes of Son House, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and Screaming Jay Hawkins, as filtered through Led Zeppelin's blues rock, there are occasional hints of The Kinks and The Small Faces, with Jack sounding as much like Rod Stewart in some places as he does a young Robert Plant. There are fleeting glimpses, too, of British post-punk (especially, Magazine), which suggests that during their time spent in London (the LP was recorded at the legendary, lo-fi Toe Rag Studio) they absorbed a little British musical history by osmosis.

The album opens with 'Seven Nation Army' and re-establishes The White Stripes' primacy in the garage-blues league by filleting 'I Put a Spell On You' and adding savagely serrated guitar runs. Then it's into the satisfying, top-speed chugga of 'Black Math' before 'There's No Home For You Here', where passages of quiet highlight the Cave-like literariness of Jack's lyrics. A cover of Bacharach's 'Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself' is sublime, the heavy space between each rationed sound as vital as the sound itself.

Meg makes her singing debut on a lean 'Cold Cold Night' - in sharp contrast to the wigged-out 'Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine', where the tambourine hisses like a rattlesnake. The LP closes with 'It's True That We Love One Another', a country-toned, tongue-in cheek debate between Jack, Meg and guest vocalist Holly Golightly about that hoary brother/sister-husband/wife issue.

The silent but suggested 'white' in the title must be Meg and Jack's little joke - 'Elephant' is already this year's most crucial purchase.

Eric Greenwood, Drawer B, June 15th, 2003

Miraculously untainted by severe over-exposure, The White Stripes return with another blistering set of mock-blues through the eyes of two pasty white-faced Goths from Detroit in candy stripe drag. Musically, Elephant is just as raw and spontaneous as it would have been had no one given two shits about the duo’s breakthrough album, White Blood Cells. Lyrically, however, Jack White acknowledges some of the effects of fame and fortune with hints of paranoia and defensive aggression, but these moments are few and far between the searing, squawking guitar solos that will blow the hair clear off your head.

White’s main concern is not his stature in any rock and roll climate, indie or otherwise, but, rather, the rock and roll itself. Elephant is an old fashioned rock record- the kind almost no band dares even try to make anymore for fear of being trampled with ‘retread’ accusations. But this is a challenge White clearly yearns for, as he’s confident that his guitar chops are on par with the ghosts of legendary blues-men past. Infused with disingenuous bravado, white-boy blues, and a cataclysmic urgency, Elephant is a mass of contradictions, wherein Jack White struts his guitar machismo while simultaneously yearning for his mother’s love.

Eschewing any hint of technology, The White Stripes used strictly vintage instruments in the two-week studio stint in London it took to create Elephant (nothing created post-1963, thank you very much) and opted for vinyl copies of its promotional material, just to be consistent. It’s a strange irony, then, that the pirated copies being downloaded weeks before its official release contained the crackle and hiss of vinyl. Such attention to detail pays off, though, as Elephant is a startlingly dark and consistent record, incorporating frequencies never before heard on a White Stripes album.

The slinky bass line that opens “Seven Nation Army” is actually just a guitar fed through an old octave pedal, but it seduces all the same. And while Meg White is certainly not running for John Bonham any time soon, her self-consciously minimal style allows more room for Jack White’s crazed guitar theatrics. It’s a subtle anthem, hypnotic in its uniform pulse yet frantic in its shrill aggression and an outstanding opener. “Black Math” explores familiar garage rock territory but with explosive results. White sounds truly possessed in his manic delivery, and the guitar is as crunchy as it is jaunty. Then, suddenly, Queen enters the list of influences on the “Dead Leaves On The Dirty Ground” rewrite, “There’s No Home For You Here”, with its wall of choral Jack Whites and vitriolic guitar.

Covering Dusty Springfield would seem a calculatedly kitsch move for a band like The White Stripes, but the version of “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” is truly stunning. White’s ability to sound plaintive and sincere one moment and then absolutely out of his mind the next takes the song to unexpected places. Much like the band’s gut-punching version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”, this cover almost outshines the original. Allowing Meg White to sing unaccompanied wouldn’t behoove many bands’ stature, but what she lacks in talent she makes up for with unassuming charm, making “In The Cold, Cold Night” not only palatable but also somewhat hard to resist.

Despite all the showiness inherent to The White Stripes’ schtick, Jack White’s ballads always manage to reveal a battered heart. He can shift gears effortlessly, pulling you into his complicated quest for love, as on the innocently affecting “I Want To Be The Boy”, in which White attempts to woo a girl’s mother in vain. Better still is the lovely “You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket”, which seems gentle and sweet on the surface with its light acoustic strumming and plaintive singing but exposes a somewhat sinister agenda at its core. White’s delivery is so convincing you’ll barely notice his disturbing point of view (“I want to keep you in my pocket/where there’s no way out”), but that’s a testament to his skillful songwriting.

Sometimes White lays on the cocksure blues act a little thickly. “Ball And A Biscuit” drags on far too long, as White waxes incoherently about his masculinity, but the shit-ripping guitar interludes between the verses make it worth suffering through. White’s explosive tangents reveal a prowess that almost justifies such shameless braggadocio. Who knew this guy could play like this? Continuing Elephant’s quest for total domination of your accolades is the foot stomping “The Hardest Button To Button”, the opening riff of which recalls a sped-up version of the Talking Head’s “Psycho Killer.” And “Little Acorns” lays a murderous sludge-metal riff over White’s sexually charged silliness, where he intones, “be like the squirrel” and makes it sound like a clever idea.

It’s easy to hate The White Stripes because one can hardly escape them these days, but Elephant is one of those once in a blue moon records that actually lives up to its hype. There’s little fat to cut, as every single song proves its worthiness in one way or another. I had crazy expectations for this album and was sorely disappointed at first. But after weeks of returning to it, I finally understood where it was coming from, and now I can’t leave it alone.

When you're as celebrated as the White Stripes, it can't be easy to keep one-upping yourself. But Jack and Meg White do it effortlessly with their fourth album (and second after the world started listening). Elephant's rehashed garage rock is a thunderous triumph, reverberating with meaty riffs, primal rhythms and crude energy (which actually incorporates bass sounds this time). But the songs that sparkle here are the ones that break from the Detroit duo's familiar country-Goth mold. The two do a staggering job when they take the air out of the Burt Bacharach-penned Dusty Springfield ballad "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" or morph into the Velvet Underground when Meg takes over the vocals on "In the Cold, Cold Night." Then there's that beautifully bizarre love triangle with British blues singer Holly Golightly on the closing "It's True That We Love One Another." It's a massive success.

Alexis Pretridis, The Guardian, March 28th, 2003

Recently, there has been much talk of the New Rock Revolution. The music press claims that a host of young guitar bands, invariably called things like the Thrills or the Kills, are poised to burst from the margins, capture the national consciousness and rid the charts of manufactured pop, novelty dance and corporate rock.

Even broadsheets have proclaimed that musical regime change is afoot. Possessed by the spirit of Ned Ludd, one august critic recently denounced technology as "nonsense", and claimed "the New Rock Revolution won't be doing with any of that". Another announced that "the stage-school troupers dominating the top 40 now have competition from a more stirring source: short, shocking records made with electric guitars".

Not judging by this week's top 40. It features 15 manufactured pop singles, 10 hip-hop and R&B records, seven novelty dance tracks and six examples of horrible corporate rock. Some of the corporate rockers dress as punks, but they might as well dress as King Alfonso IV of Portugal for all the relevance it has to their music. There are two indie singles, by 1990s survivors Placebo and Saint Etienne, but no guitar-slinging sedition.
As ever, it seems, the handful of exciting "alternative" bands have about as much chance of storming the top 10 as they have of being elected to the Vatican Council. The New Rock Revolution will not be televised, because the public are still glued to Fame Academy.

In this light, Detroit duo the White Stripes appear unique, largely because people other than music journalists seem to like them. In fact, everybody seems to like them, from teenage moshers to grumpy fortysomethings given to dismissing modern music with a jaded frown.

They have appeared everywhere, from the Sun to Radio 4's Today programme: no band since Oasis has achieved such blanket approval. Sales are burgeoning. White Blood Cells, their third album, shifted almost a million copies. Elephant, their fourth, is 2003's most anticipated album. Reliably daft, the NME proclaimed it among the 100 best albums ever a month before its release.

The White Stripes have managed to distance themselves from the media brouhaha, claiming Elephant will be a disappointment, while simultaneously playing the media like a vintage Valco Airline guitar.

First Jack White announced their split, later claiming he had been misquoted. There was the obligatory commotion about internet piracy. The White Stripes' solution - sending out advance copies on vinyl - did nothing to curb the downloaders, but did create an instant rarity, provoke ferocious eBay bidding, and garner more press.

The duo's approach to publicity recalls the old Peter Cook sketch in which Greta Garbo sat on the roof of a car, bellowing through a loudhailer that she wanted to be alone. It is as contradictory as the popular image of the White Stripes' bluesy grunge as an unpretentious alternative to contrived modern rock.

In fact, it is difficult to imagine a more contrived band: Jack and Meg White sport uniforms on stage, pretend to be brother and sister, write mannered lyrics about courtly love and have recorded Elephant on vintage 1950s equipment. Quite why the White Stripes are viewed as grimily authentic, while the Strokes are derided as a kind of indie Backstreet Boys, remains a mystery.

But authenticity in rock is an overrated virtue. It certainly doesn't matter when an album sounds this strong.

Jack White has a point about progression: Elephant sticks close to the standard White Stripes design. Hulking blues riffs, barely controlled solos and the thrillingly primitive thwack of Meg White's drumming are still much in evidence.

Their approach is so ascetic that the slightest embellishment - Meg White's childlike vocals on Cold Cold Night, the occasional burst of bass on Seven Nation Army and The Hardest Button to Button - sounds like a radical departure. The backing vocals of There's No Home for You Here have prompted comparisons to Queen.

Somewhere, Freddie Mercury is tearing his moustache out, horrified at the very suggestion: mewling, noisy, it sounds exactly like the White Stripes with some backing vocalists.

The lyrics hit home, witty rather than affected: "I gave that horse a carrot so he'd break your foot," sniggers White on It's True That We Love One Another. The guitar playing occasionally makes you gasp, as when There's No Home For You Here explodes in a flurry of painfully high-pitched notes.

At those moments, the White Stripes' music seems almost elemental, their power undeniable: it is clear why they are the only band to have transcended the indie ghetto.

The duo have refined their sound until it is shatteringly effective. Nevertheless, Elephant sounds suspiciously like the White Stripes' apotheosis.

It is hard to fathom how much longer they can keep doing the same thing, or where they can take their self-consciously limited sound without undermining the reasons people like them.

Elephant is an album that seems guaranteed to put the White Stripes up there with the manufactured pop bands, novelty dance acts and corporate rockers. But how long their success will last is open to question.

Darryl Sterdan, JAM! Music / Winnipeg Sun, March 21 2003

It's a funny thing: Teenagers become rock musicians because they want to be rich and famous.

But anybody who's watched so much as a single Behind the Music segment knows fame and fortune have destroyed more bands than bad aviation, heroin, vomit, ham sandwiches and Yoko Ono combined.

Give your average struggling rock band worldwide recognition and Lotto-level moolah and you can almost guarantee their next album will be either a self-indulgent wankfest or a pale Xerox of its predecessor. Either way, it's almost sure to suck and blow simultaneously.

We can only thank our lucky stars that The White Stripes are not your average rock band. Despite their dizzying, near-vertical ascent from obscure Detroit garage-rockers to global indie-gods in the wake of their last album White Blood Cells, success has apparently not spoiled Jack and Meg White.

Hell, if their forthcoming fourth album is anything to go by, it's barely even registered on their radar.

On the 14-track Elephant -- fittingly due April Fool's Day on CD and coloured vinyl, with six different covers -- things are pretty much the same as they ever were in Stripeland.

Singer-guitarist Jack and ex-wife drummer Meg are still the king and queen of their own little world. They still pretend to be brother and sister. They still dress in red and white. They're still musical Luddites. They still write songs that toggle between garage-rock, blues, folk, Detroit metal and even country, yet somehow retain a stylistic consistency.

Meg still bashes away with all the enthusiasm and technique of a happy kindergartener. Jack is still a one-man wall of fuzz-rawk glory -- and a damned talented songwriter to boot. And we bet they still wonder what all the fuss is about.

Albums like this are what all the fuss is about. Recorded in just two short weeks on an eight-track tape machine and instruments that are older than the band members, Elephant -- supposedly dedicated to "The Death of the Sweetheart" -- is yet another lo-fi masterwork from the Sonny and Cher (or at least the Royal Trux) of the 21st century.

More to the point, it's also a brilliantly planned and flawlessly executed followup to White Blood Cells, remaining true to their garage-rock roots -- an elephant never forgets, after all -- while simultaneously pushing the envelope just far enough to keep themselves interested and fend off accusations of artistic stagnation.

Most of the set list is virtually guaranteed to please the masses who flocked to White Blood Cells. Loved those blistering, bloozy stompers? There's plenty of 'em here, like the primal Black Math, the searing Girl, You Have no Faith in Medicine and the Zeppelinesque Ball and Biscuit. In love with Fell in Love With a Girl? Skip to Hypnotise, which does the frug to the same go-go beat. Prefer the downtempo brooding of Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground? Meet its second cousin, There's No Home for You Here. Repeat. Enjoy.

At the same time, though, the Stripes add a few new flavours and dishes to the menu for folks who want more than another portion of comfort food. I Want to be the Boy is a piano number that captures Jack rasping away like some ersatz Rod Stewart. Little Acorns cuts and pastes a self-help infomercial to brooding piano chords. You've Got Her in Your Pocket is a quietly gorgeous little folk-blues number. In the Cold, Cold Night is a Fever-ish little ditty featuring Meg on the mic. There's No Home for You Here finds Jack juxtaposing squealing feedback and Beatlesque choral melody.

And the countrified closer It's True That we Love One Another exposes Jack and Meg in a musical menage with U.K. garage-pop goddess Holly Golightly, who winkingly says she loves Jack "like a little brother." His reply: "Well, Holly, I love you too / But there's just so much that I don't know about you."

Not that that's a bad thing -- after all, despite all their success, we still don't know all that much about Jack and Meg White, which is a nice change of pace in our world of celebrity baby pictures and reality TV.

But here's one thing we do know: Elephant sounds like an album The White Stripes would have made even if they weren't being hailed as the world's greatest rock 'n' roll band.

And that's precisely why they deserve to be.

Ric Dube, Junk Media

It's good news that modern rock radio hasn't abandoned the White Stripes; "Seven Nation Army" is getting a ton of airplay. It was smart to get the new disc, Elephant, out while their 2001 late bloomer, White Blood Cells, is still fresh on the mainstream's mind. Elephant just might be a better record.

Frankly, it's not easy to make pure rock particularly interesting. Founding fathers such as Chuck Berry get a lot of kudos, but in 2003 his records are boring as hell. The blues is dull, which is why Chuck Berry turned up his amp in the first place. But every now and then a band comes along that can hold your attention. And by "your attention," I apparently mean everyone in America, because they all turned out for the White Stripes.

You may or may not remember when the Presidents of the United States of America and the Squirrel Nut Zippers each "benefitted" from the freak occurrence of flipping to the big time before taking overnight success to its inevitable disastrous end. When indie phenoms catch the public's attention, it's a fatal disease.

But the White Stripes will endure. Elephant will be successful because the timing is right and because the White Stripes -- despite the silly suits, the no-bass gimmick and the contrived hillbilly family relations -- are not a novelty act and do not write novelty songs. Jack White writes good songs from simple elements, like the Rolling Stones were able to do in the early '70s.

In addition to songs, you've got squealing-ass guitar solos on "Ball and Biscuit," "Black Math" and "Hypnotise." "There's No Home For You Here" even has a fantastic vocal performance and "Girl You Have No Faith in Medicine" is as good as any Bon-era AC/DC classic. It's not all stupidhead music, either. "The Air Near My Fingers" lets a Rhodes organ carry some subtle melody, "You've Got Her In Your Pocket" is a genuine ballad, and "It's True That We Love One Another" closes the record with an autobiographical folk duet.

So the news is good. They didn't sell out, they didn't run out of ideas, and they were able to find still more places to yell "Whooo!" Go buy this now.

John Mulvey, New Musical Express

For one who talks so much about honesty, Jack White is a difficult man to trust. When last we hear him on 'Elephant', he is hanging out on what sounds like Lee Hazlewood's porch, but is actually Toerag Studios in Hackney, engaged in a giggly menage a trois with Holly Golightly and his beloved sister Meg. Holly is pushy, loving Jack "like a little brother". Meg opines, "Jack really bugs me". Jack is cagey, but eventually succumbs. "Well Holly I love you too," he admits, "But there's just so much that I don't know about you."

And just so much, Jack, that we don't know about you. Even after 'It's True That We Love One Another', Track 14 of the fourth White Stripes album, all remains deliriously unclear in the world of Jack and Meg White. Here are devious confusions between romantic and maternal love, a neurotic approach to the wiles of women, numerology, infantilism and, not least, some of the most obliteratingly brilliant rock'n'roll of our time.

In other words, business as usual at Camp White Stripe. Improbable success, old marriage certificates in the public domain, the New Rock Revolution - nothing has adversely affected the way they conduct their business. There are cosmetic changes, with longer hair and outfits fit for Grand Ole Opry goths. But, still, they look more suited to a night out in Detroit's ruins rather than restyled for celebrity.

In the recording studio, too, not much has altered. The location's shifted from Detroit to London, though only the presence of Holly Golightly and Jack brandishing a cricket bat on the cover signal it. 'Elephant' remains the work of champion Luddites, recorded onto eight-track tape using equipment built before 1963 - guitars, Meg's drums, the odd keyboard. The bristly frequencies that open the album aren't a bass, but Jack's guitar fed through an octave pedal. Review copies are exclusively vinyl. Jack and Meg still address one another as brother and sister. How sweet. How determined. How treacherous.

Musically honest - as in untainted by those hussies, computers - it may be. But Jack's definitions are slippery. The White Stripes' music has always existed in a fabricated reality, defined by Jack in his first NME interview. "I like things as honest as possible," he conceded, "even if sometimes they can only be an imitation of honesty."

If The White Stripes hadn't become superstars, 'Elephant' would probably sound pretty much like this. It stretches their musical parameters without betraying the tenets of rawness and immediacy. It sounds massive, but intimate: between Jack's slide runs, you can virtually hear the air moving round the studio. And it reminds us that, of all the bands we've embraced from Detroit and beyond in the two years since 'White Blood Cells', none can match the depth of The White Stripes.

So from the start, 'Elephant' is breathtaking. 'Seven Nation Army' begins with that faked bass, heartbeat drum, and Jack snarling through a distorted mic. The one obvious diatribe against fame, it finds him paranoid, hemmed in by intrusive questions, and pondering a move to a Wichita farm. Confusion remains his most effective security blanket. The brother and sister legend still diverts attention from when he really exposes himself, and it's now augmented by a recurring smudge between sexual and motherly love. 'The Air Near My Fingers' is typical, painting Jack as chronically nervous of a girl, longing for the security of his mom.

Is this Jack White at his most truthful? As a man unnerved and bewildered by women, who yearns for the certainties of childhood? He'd certainly like us to think so, although the attentions of Marcie Bolen may suggest different. 'Elephant' is full of songs that sound like their subject is sex and read like it's actually inadequacy. 'Hypnotize' - a belting evolution of 'Fell In Love With A Girl' - sees Jack trying desperately to control a woman, before he collapses into meek chivalry and pleads, "I want to hold your little hand if I can be so bold." On 'I Want To Be The Boy', all his attempts at courtly dating rituals end in failure. "It feels like everything I say is a lie," he mopes, pointedly.

If only girls behaved the way he wanted them to. 'There's No Home For You Here' finds him so frustrated with yet another volatile woman that the trivia of their affair becomes despicable. At times, this stereotyping of women becomes faintly unsavoury. But it smells like fiction, especially when the sentiments come couched in such histrionic music. 'There's No Home. . .' takes grisly instrospection and the tune of 'Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground' and makes vast melodrama out of them, with multi-tracked choral howls, theatrical pauses and the kind of shrill, compressed guitar solos that pockmark the whole album.

Within his valve-driven little universe, Jack White is an extravagant drama queen. Surpassing 'Jolene', on Bacharach & David's 'I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself' he replaces Dusty Springfield's forlorn grandeur with spluttery exasperation. But when he gives Meg a song to sing, 'Cold, Cold Night' is unambiguous in its carnality, a calm come-on pitched somewhere between Brenda Lee and Moe Tucker. Perhaps all those apparent flaws of fickleness and duplicity lie in the minds of men, not women.

It's easy to get lost in the vivid, unstable emotional tangle of 'Elephant'. But consistently, the brilliance of the music acts as a compass. When Jack bitterly resolves to study the rules of attraction on 'Black Math', he does so to juddering garage punk that recasts 'Let's Build A Home' in corroded metal. When he practices more dark algebra by comparing his status as his girl's "third man" to that as his mother's "seventh son" on 'Ball And Biscuit', he streamlines the epic crunch of Led Zeppelin in the album's most overt nod to the blues.

That said, the strongest influences on 'Elephant' are the three albums which preceded it. But it's a heavier one than they've made before, less immediately pop-friendly than 'De Stijl', especially, and with a nasty undercurrent that battles for prominence with Jack's romantic anxieties. He's a fabulist and a showman. But he can also voice sweetness and torment with an intensity that most conventionally emotional songwriters would kill for. Critically, he can make you believe in his songs, at the same time as you don't believe a word of them. This, perhaps, is what great songwriters do.

And always, there's the implication that he can do more. Right now, the eloquence, barbarism, tenderness and sweat-drenched vitality of 'Elephant' make it the most fully-realised White Stripes album yet. All the excitement we want from rock'n'roll is here, and miraculously few of the cliches. But there's a sense, too, that Jack White is still grappling with adolescence: explicitly in his lyrics; metaphorically in the astonishing, still rudimentary punch of the music. The prospect of his finally reaching adulthood - with or without Meg - is explosive, and not a little terrifying.

Ethan Brown, New York Magazine, April 21st, 2003

Dynamic Duo

With the dazzling Elephant, the White Stripes push new retro rock to ever greater heights.

When does classicism become conservatism? The question shadows the White Stripes, a Detroit rock duo who have made a career of resisting modernity, from putting out vinyl-only releases to giving finger-wagging interviews bemoaning twenty-first-century genres like rap-metal. With its starkly minimalist production and a CD cover picturing drummer Meg White draped in a white gown that could have been pulled from Coal Miner’s Daughter, the White Stripes’ fourth album, Elephant, seems perfectly in tune with the band’s retro coda.

But the White Stripes have never swallowed nostalgia whole, or rather they’ve digested so many influences—from Dolly Parton to Led Zeppelin—that it’s impossible to think of them as anything but modern. And they derive considerable power from flirting with disasters that doom artists—mainly cutesiness and sentimentality—and then pulling away as the embrace seems certain.

Elephant embodies this high-wire act with stunning success. It is stranger, thornier, and meaner than anything in the band’s past. The album’s most powerful song, “There’s No Home for You Here,” conveys a brutal hopelessness; “Little Acorns” begins with a fifties-style PSA about the resilience of squirrels and then morphs into a frenzied howl about the excesses of modernity. And the cover of Bacharach and David’s “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” is less a tribute than a desiccation; Jack White delivers the song in a creepy Tiny Tim trill.

The greatest accomplishment of Elephant, though, is the expanded sense of sonic possibilities explored by the band. The White Stripes explode their own formula: Sledgehammer guitar riffs, clutter-and-crash drumming, give way to sinister electric-guitar-fed bottom and most memorably, Jack’s “ahhhhh!” stretched and multitracked to psychedelic heights on “There’s No Home for You Here.” It’s no wall of sound but a roomful of garage-rock conventions collapsing in on themselves.

Like Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy, which channeled Phil Spector and the Beach Boys through a fuzzbox, Elephant is a testament to the power of looking backward—not going back to basics but tapping into the primal force of rock. This has always been evident in the White Stripes’ live shows—where Jack exhibits the wild-eyed energy of Jerry Lee Lewis or Johnnie Ray—but not in its albums, which have been tempered by a two-dimensional sound. With Elephant, the White Stripes’ primordial stomp through rock history at last comes thrillingly to life (The White Stripes play the Hammerstein Ballroom on April 19, with Loretta Lynn opening).

Keith Phipps, The Onion A.V. Club, April 2nd, 2003

The one downside of great albums is that they can only be heard for the first time once: Imagine being able to hear Let It Bleed or 1999 again for the first time, to be taken aback by greatness once more. So listeners should savor their first encounter with The White Stripes' Elephant. Only time will determine whether the album joins the ranks of those greats (though time looks to be on its side), but it shares their spirit of daring and diversity, and their desire to move forward when there seems to be nowhere else to go. All the elements of previous White Stripes records surface again, but in weirder, more intense strains that don't break with Jack and Meg White's past, yet don't slavishly adhere to it, either. Scattered throughout and mixed together are elements of blues and country, as well as songs simple enough for children to sing, but raucous enough that they could only come from the far side of puberty, tempered by a vulnerability that can border on desperation. A track so quiet it's barely there, "You've Got Her In Your Pocket" captures the ache of a relationship about to go wrong. It's followed by the seven-minute "Ball And Biscuit," a bath of sexual braggadocio that resurrects the folk staple of the seventh son, invests the word "biscuit" with never-before-considered connotations, boasts Jack's first recorded guitar solo, and features the meanest blues to come out of England—where the Detroit natives recorded Elephant on decades-old equipment—since the days of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. The Stripes make both songs equally convincing, which speaks to a talent that the rest of the album confirms with each track. Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" already channeled the sound of a life that had its bottom drop out, but here, it's re-created with an almost demonic fervor. "There's No Home For You Here" underscores its point with a seemingly bottomless chorus of multi-tracked Jack Whites. Taking a break from her heartbeat thump, Meg even takes a moment in the spotlight on "In The Cold Cold Night," and somehow, before the album ends, a self-help lecture about a squirrel becomes a great piece of rock 'n' roll. The credits roll over an endearing joke of a song called "It's True That We Love One Another," in which Jack annoys Meg and flirts with guest star Holly Golightly, who winds up Elephant asking for a cup of tea. It's a final surprise on an album that's full of them, and that offers rewards long after the surprises have worn away.

Brent DiCrescenzo, Pitchfork Media, April 2 2003

Church's Fried Chicken now sits at the crossroads of Highway 49 and Highway 61 in Clarksdale, Mississippi like an unaware, prefabricated neon mausoleum. While you can no longer barter your soul to Beelzebub for guitar-picking prowess, The Man will gladly exchange your eternal being for a place on the fryer and a hairnet. Or one may just opt for the Sweet Biscuit Crunchers and some Purple Pepper Sauce for a dollar. The tragicomic irony of a fast food joint squatting on the Valhalla of Delta Blues out-tarnishes our collective lore more than the Bus Stop of Gethsemane and adjoining Mount of Olives Hotel. And when you toss one of those sugary Sweet Biscuit Crunchers or gooey Honey-Butter Biscuits into your fat maw, you can let your mind drift to the thinly veiled sexual euphemisms of the blues, where biscuit almost certainly means "vagina."

The Blues had been raped, exploited, stolen, diluted, rediscovered, reforgotten, and rendered meaningless countless times long before the Russian Mafia kept hot on the heels of the Blues Brothers 2000 and the House of Blues primarily showcased Wu-Tang side projects and Godsmack. Now, nearly a century after its birth, a non-ironic, post-Jon Spencer form of the Blues has risen again, ever so stubbornly and somnolently-- and naturally, it's being led by white kids. Jack White *ahem* not only name-drops Robert Johnson, he covers him. Summons him. Wears the same little derby as him. On "Ball and Biscuit", the album-stretching stomper of the White Stripes' fourth album, Jack White moans, "Let's have a ball and a biscuit, sugar," and it's all too plainly clear what he means.

What's less clear on the track and the rest of Elephant, however, is just what Jack White intends. Certainly, one of his goals is to simply Rock, which his shit-hot guitar solos do bombastically. Those Sears-Roebucks pickups buzz and screech like atomic harmonicas on the album's best songs. Past this, though, White struggles to tenuously weld a growing amalgam of contradictions and genre experiments held with a veneer of schtick, persona, and Fonzie cool, while Meg's pancake-handed drumming and the two-piece format drips solvent over the whole experiment.

The problem being that Jack White wishes to honor his diverse heroes with a limited palette. Imagine paying tribute to Edward Hopper, Ansel Adams, Robert Colescott, and Georgia O'Keeffe in mural with a foot-pump-operated Wagner Power Painter, a bucket of red, and a bucket of white. You're going to get a pinkish, art-student Pollock knock-off. "Hypnotize" valiantly strives for The Stooges. "In the Cold, Cold Night" swings its hips across an unfurnished saloon. "Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine" gives four fingers up to a butcher's knife on the altar of Led Zeppelin. In the end, it should not have to be spelled out in detail that Jack White is no Jim Page nor Osterberg. Suggestions to the contrary will earn you an explanation at the end of the Questionable Musical Taste line on judgment day. Meanwhile, Meg White pleads to her man like a coy Mo Tucker or Georgia Hubley-- more so than take-no-sass Patsy Cline or Dusty in Memphis. Linty in Arkadelphia, perhaps.

The White Stripes' two strengths lie in their understanding of the physics of "rock 'n' roll" and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, their ability to craft a beautiful little boy/girl ditty. As for the former, guitars kick in at the mathematically precise moment. Drums drop out of the atmosphere in their window of opportunity only to knock you back like a returning pendulum. And for the latter, "You've Got Her in Your Pocket", like "We're Going to Be Friends", makes one wish this whole new Foghat rock thing would blow over and make way for the Badfinger/Splinter/Fairport Convention revival that's been long overdue. Therein lies the contradiction of The White Stripes. How do you combine the shit-hot with the "twee?" Elephant's shortcomings suggests the enterprise is futile. Similarly, the naïveté of Meg's playing deflates any Big Rock aspirations. The child-like imagery of candy and Howdy Doody shirts renders Howlin' Wolf-like braggadocio transparent.

More importantly, the Stripes' multilayered contrived personas, both within individual songs and as the greater public face of the band, fogs sincerity. The useless, cheeky album closer, "It's True That We Love One Another", sums up this last obstacle. Piling on the Meta like Charlie Kaufman scripted the lyrics, the hoe-down toys with the Jack and Meg relationship "mystery" that was made abundantly clear in the 459 press articles on The White Stripes over the last two years while throwing Holly Golightly into a threesome of unfunny winks. When Jack sings, "I've got your number written in the back of my Bible," a theoretically rich image from a much better unrealized song is wasted on an in-joke.

The album title refers to the endangered animal's brute power and their less honored instinctual memory for dead relatives. Essentially, The White Stripes admit to the contradictions in their music, but run through their hall of fame like a mad pachyderm. In a climate of kitchen-tinkered, designer cuisine pop, the album offers buckets of batter fried guitar crunch. On tracks such as "Black Math" and "Little Acorns" the grease and grunge of cheap guitar ingredients cover slim-pickings from the songwriting chicken. People who just want some fried chicken may drive-thru and get a quick fix, but remember that underneath the spirits of the heroes are waiting for a true seance.

Jeres, Play Louder, April 28th, 2003

So 'Elephant' is finally upon us, though the idea of it seems to have been around for as long as we can remember. It's a good job then that they've done a spanking job of it, otherwise they may as well have packed their trunk and said goodbye to the circus. It's an apt name, a colossal record, much bigger than their other three. It's funkier, it's noisier, and there's a few more tricks and a surprise or two as well. There's some bass for a start. Where did that come from? There's a bleedin' choir on 'There's No Home For You Here'! Where did all those people come from? On 'Little Acorns' there's a sampled voice. A sampled voice? Christ! Jack White's woken up and realised it's the 20th Century. It's the 21st, but you know, let the boy catch up in his own time. Still, don't go expecting Aphex Twin or anything; 'Black Math' or 'I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother's Heart' wouldn't sound out of place on 'White Blood Cells', and 'Ball And Biscuit' is a 12-bar blues number, but in many ways The White Stripes have never been fresher, more vibrant or seemed more like they're loving it.

The weakest bits are, sorry to say it, when Meg White is behind the microphone. Meg herself would probably be the first to admit she's not the greatest singer, and 'In The Cold, Cold Night' is at best, endearing, though it will still probably have you reaching for the skip button. There's no excuse for 'Well It's True That We Love One Another' though. Horrendously twee, about how Meg loves her little brother, and how 'little Jack White' loves his big sis, you'll be either cringing, or saying "aww, ain't it sweet" depending on whether you're an idiot or not.

But 'Seven Nation Army' -­ what a song. Now that's how you start an album. Effortlessly cool, funky, hook laden, immediate, and sexy as fuck. If it doesn't get under your skin and give you goose bumps, you probably don't have any skin, you freak. Jack White has definitely got the funk, and some of his guitar playing is truly awesome; the boy didn't just make a pact with the devil, he gave him a blow job too. Meg is better on the drums as well.

The White Stripes may not have peaked yet, but they'll have to go some way to sound better than this. 'De Stijl' is just about better song for song, but the sheer vitality and energy of this one alone makes 'Elephant' their most accomplished record to date. Enjoy.

Tim Alves, Pop Matters, April 4th, 2003

The White Stripes are our saviors, and they will lead us to the promised land that flows with milk and honey.

"How scandalous! What unfounded hyperbole!" you scream. You are wrong. So very, very wrong.

Just one listen -- a singular exposure -- to Elephant, the fourth and latest offering from Jack and Meg White, is proof enough that the Stripes have come to take us to rock nirvana, a place last visited in . . . well, it's been so long I can't even remember when the rock has been this hard, this grimy. Nay sayers beware! Judgment day is upon us, and, like Kirk Cameron, you will be left behind.

Jack and Meg have on a collision course with this kind of defining moment from the opening blues riffs of their self-titled debut. Each album, from the White Stripes to De Stijl to White Blood Cells, has shown their evolution from Blind Willie McTell cover band with a pop sensibility to full-fledged, honest-to-goodness rock 'n' roll gods, a status finally reached on their latest disc. Don't be fooled -- I don't care if the peppermint-swaddled duo is on every damn music magazine from here to Basra -- Jack's guitar will eviscerate you and drag your entrails around while Meg goes smashy-smashy in the heaviest, most simplistic way possible.

No, the songs on Elephant aren't any more complex or intricate than anything else the Stripes have done, but the quality throughout the album is new. While White Blood Cells had a stellar first half, stomping its way from "Dead Leaves" to "Little Room" before slowing it down for the kids on "The Same Boy You've Always Known" and in general throwing the so-so tracks towards the end. Doesn't happen this time around, as the songs from beginning to end rarely falter.

There are striking similarities to previous songs -- Jack may be prolific, but there isn't a need to start repeating ideas. Luckily, "There's No Home for You Here" apes "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground", the best song on the last album. The differences between the two are, uh, subtle -- hey Jack, how about adding female backup singers to throw listeners off the scent? But any song with a snotty Jack spitting out these lyrics is a-okay with me:

Waking up for breakfast
Burning matches
Talking quickly
Breaking bottles
Throwing garbage
Drinking soda
Looking happy
Taking pictures
So completely stupid
Just go away

And don't you come near my trailer park no more! "Hypnotize" is this year's "Fell in Love with a Girl", all lighting-fast punk riffing with Meg bashing the skins as fast as she can. But why quibble with a song that cribs from the best rock single of the past two years?

Elephant will grab you from the first note, I can guarantee you of that. Through some fancy guitar chicanery, Jack appears to whip out (gasp!) a bass on "Seven Nation Army", the first single and album opener. Everybody cool out -- Mr. White had some free cash and decided to buy some crazy contraption that twists his trusty gee-tar into some low-toned monster, ready to rub you out if you turn away. No one's stupid enough to do that, right? Not when the chorus kicks in and Jack unleashes his fury on the masses.

Then comes to explosive "Black Math", for which Mr. White becomes a taunting, evil child, yelling at his antagonists "unh unh unh unh unh!" The taunting eventually melts into frustration (and possible insanity) when the duo takes a stab at Burt Bacharach's "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself". It begins with a strained Jack muttering, "Going to a movie only makes me sad / Parties make me feel as bad / Because I'm not with you / I just don't know what to do" before exploding in sexual and romantic frustration with the poor sap strangling out "I need your sweet love to beat all the pain / I just don't know what to do with myself" in a maniacal, cracked delivery. Does Jack ever go big on that scene … and still manages to sell it. Riveting.

And all those clamoring for a solo Meg get their wish (what, there are only two of you?). "Cold, Cold Night" delivers a quiet song as sung by the female half of the Stripes, and Meg does a competent job. She also gets in on the jokey final song, "It's True That We Love One Another", as Jack, Meg and special guest star Holly Golightly all express their love … for one another. Cute, but it feels tacked on so as to continue the mythology that Jack and Meg have created around their relationship to one another.

Who knew the Stripes had a seven-minute song in them? On "Ball and Biscuit" they rip out 7:15 of stalking bluesy bombast intercut with thundering Zeppelin rampages through the thick Mississippi Delta. While Jack deals with similar themes as in the past (silly girls, broken hearts and the innocence of youth), the energy and commitment of his delivery prevents the repetition from grating on the nerves. It's tough to care if Jack sounds like a 10-year-old in a 30-year-old body when the music is trampling your will to resist.

Here's your last warning, unbelievers: Grab Jack's outstretched hand before you, lest the devils wrestle you down! Repent, for the time to ascend to the gates of rock heaven is nigh!

John Harris, Q Magazine, March 2003

Two years on, the question of why the world suddenly decided to drop at The White Stripes' feet in the spring of 2001 remains as beguiling as ever. That's not to overlook their shining talent, of course, simply to marvel at the unlikeliness of their breakthrough. With the USA's rock music in the grip of the nose-ring / angst fraternity, and the UK divided up between such populist Virgin Radio regulars as Travis and Starsailor, it hardly seemed the most fertile time for a uniformed, bass-free duo, fond of the founding fathers of the blues, the more ragged end of '60s garage-rock, Captain Beefheart, Bob Dylan and Loretta Lynn. "We're not really MTV material," reckoned Jack White. But then again...

Looking back, their arrival in the mainstream had touch of the cavalry about it. In terms of what 21st century rock musicwas lacking, Jack and Meg White delivered on two fronts. Firstly, in fusing a transparently punk approach with the blues, they spoke a fantastically authentic language - enough to reveal a lot of rock bands as careerist, conformist clowns - without falling prey to tedious history worship. Secondly, they provided a commendably timely reminder of the fact that the best groups live in their own universes, laden with reference points and brimming with mystery.

One can easily imagine living in a White Stripes kind of way: occasionally holidaying in Mississippi, filling one's flat with stuffed animals and rusty candelabras, alternating between Robert Johnson and Stooges records while reading the novels of William Faulkner by the light of a paraffin lamp (and, naturally, wearing white trousers)

Their fourth album, to Jack and Meg White's credit, may be their richest work to date. It was recorded over two weeks at Toe Rag studios in East London, a low-rent place in which none of the equipment dates from later than 1963. If such a location suggested a quest to reduce their music to its most basic essence, it's some indication of The White Stripes' alchemical skills that the result frequently borders on the magical. The titles provide all kinds of hints of the wonderment at work: Black Math, Seven Nation Army, Ball And Biscuit. Essentially, they manage, over and over again, to make the idea of America enchanting again.

On a slightly more prosaic level, they've also developed as musicians. "I can?t see any progression at all," said Jack White, just as this album was completed. "A lot of people purposely progress. We've never done that." In so far as he and Meg haven't called in a string quartet or attempted to ape the early work of Kraftwerk, he has a point ? but there again, on a good two-thirds of Elephant, things seem to have acquired a new textured, deep-pile quality. The abiding sound is fuller. There are clear bass frequencies ? even, on a couple of tracks, the dreaded four-string instrument itself. Those who have been following their progress for a little longer than most people might well hear echoes of their multi-faceted second album, 2000's De Stijl - although Elephant repeatedly oozes a proud confidence that they had yet to acquire back then.

The album's best example of all that is I Want To Be The Boy, a luxuriant hymn to unrequited love, founded on a piano part that meshes with Jack's scabrous guitar to beautiful effect. Here, the archetypal White Stripes sound - primal, sweat-soaked, unhinged, founded on Meg's boom-crash attack - mutates into something altogether more sophisticated. "I'm inclined to go and finish high school," sings Jack, sounding like he may be about to weep, "just to make her notice I?m around." In its evocation of dusty avenues, broken hopes, and aimless hours spent sitting on the porch, it's pretty much perfect. The same kind of theme defines You've Got Her In Your Pocket: simply Jack and an acoustic guitar, sounding both unaffected and profound, in the way that a grade A student of Dylan would.

Naturally, they also spend a lot of their time ripping it up. Black Math is a supercharged distillation of the same kind of spirit that Led Zeppelin conjured up on Communication Breakdown. As with some of the best White Stripes songs, The Hardest Button To Button manages to fuse its bulgey-eyed energy with an affectingly eerie aspect: here, to reduce it to a rather crude essence, is the kind of sound that Keith Richards might have introduced to The Rolling Stones around 1976 had he not been weakened by both heroin and Mick Jagger's fondness for disco. Meanwhile, when such adrenalised designs fuse with Jack and Meg's new spirit of adventure, things get very impressive indeed: there's a particularly dizzying moment during There's No Home For You Here when, as if from nowhere, a Queen-esque faux-choir repeats the title. As if they suddenly thought better of it, it's accompanied by a scream of guitar noise that approximates the impact of bullets penetrating a sheet of glass.

For those who fell in love with The White Stripes via their pared-down take on electric blues, there is one particular treat: Ball And Biscuit, which camply speaks the intrigue-laden language beloved of pre-war bluesmen: "It's quite possible that I'm your third man, girl/But it's fact that I'm the seventh son". If, in the context of much of the rest of Elephant, it sounds like a reversion to type, it has enough charm to get away with it, though the same doesn't quite apply to Hypnotize and Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine: splenetic noise-outs that sound a little too generic and enthusiastically belted out without much consideration of their merits.

There are also three curios: a cover version of Dusty Springfield's I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself, whose portrait of lonely ennui is given added force by the fact that it seems to have been recorded at high volume in a cave; a vehicle for Meg's untutored vocals entitled Cold Cold Night, kind of like The Velvet Underground's Mo Tucker covering The Doors circa Riders On The Storm; and a whimsical finale entitled It's True That We Love One Another - Jack, Meg and the British "freakbeat" chanteuse Holly Golightly mischievously camping it up as the three corners of a love triangle. "Holly, give me some of your English lovin'," ventures Jack. "If I did that, Jack," she replies, "I'd have one in the oven."

In a different context, the latter song might sound both trite and unnecessarily self-conscious. Here, it simply serves to add yet another strand to a brilliantly tangled album: a record sufficiently impressive to suggest that White Blood Cells caught Jack and Meg using only a fraction of their talents. Take note, all you rock'n'rollers: from now on, The White Stripes are definitely the ones to beat.

David Fricke, Rolling Stone, Issue 920, April 17 2003

There are still only two of them. But now they sound like an army. The White Stripes made Elephant, their fourth album, in just two weeks last year, at a London studio outfitted with an eight-track tape machine and recording gear that predates the Beatles. But the Detroit duo walked out with a work of pulverizing perfection. Singer-guitarist Jack White and his ex-wife, drummer Meg -- the undisputed king and queen of the new garage movement -- finally romp and rattle like a fully armed band. It is a glorious thing to hear. It will be one of the best things you hear all year.
There is, for starters, true bottom here, for the first time on a White Stripes record. Jack's dancing-cobra bass line announces, then underpins, Elephant's opening fight song, "Seven Nation Army." He also plays a low, pumping lick, pinned to Meg's kick-drum pulse, that anchors the black stomp "The Hardest Button to Button."

There is big action in the upper registers as well. In the vicious title chorus of "There's No Home for You Here," Jack subdivides his voice into a choir of Freddie Mercurys, icing his granite guitars and dirty electric piano with high hallelujah. The White Stripes dedicated their first three albums to roots-music giants: the bluesmen Son House and Blind Willie McTell and country singer Loretta Lynn. Elephant marks the crossroads where that idealism collides with the swagger and snort of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti and Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.

But that gutbucket majesty is just half of the triumph here. On Elephant, Jack White writes and sings with the same depth and viscera, exceeding the plantation holler of 2000's De Stijl and 2001's White Blood Cells with blues that both pop and bleed. "Black Math" and "Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine" shake with equal measures of Lightnin' Hopkins' crude strum, Marc Bolan's sequined boogie and the cut-'n'-thrust song hooks of the Buzzcocks. In "Black Math," Jack actually wrenches his voice into the hobbitlike bark of '71 Bolan.

For all of his blues-purist ardor, Jack never stoops to sharecropper jive. He writes in wordy avalanches of bald accusation and self-doubt. In "I Want to Be the Boy . . ." Jack uses saloon piano and elegiac bottleneck guitar to sweetly frame his flood of insecurity ("What kind of cartwheels do I have to pull?/What kind of jokes should I lay on her now?/I'm inclined to go finish high school/Just to make her notice I'm around"). He opts for heavy artillery to steady his shivers in "The Air Near My Fingers": a "Wild Thing"-style riff and a thundering bridge with hot whistles of circus-organ-like keyboard. "I get nervous when she comes around," Jack chatters repeatedly; you can feel his heart beating against his rib cage.

Meg excels in those surroundings. Her drumming is often a simple blend of tom-tom beats and cymbal splashes. But she swings -- rough yet hard, underlining Jack's guitars and vocals with the boom of the late John Bonham and the limber time of a juke-joint thumper. And as a guitarist, Jack exploits his Ph.D. in distortion to the fullest on Elephant. In the White Stripes' theatrical mauling of the Burt Bacharach-Hal David ballad "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself," the guitars veer from rumpled strum to car-horn fuzz and, at one point, an extraordinary squeal of death-ray feedback. "Ball and Biscuit" is the closest Elephant gets to straight blues; it also gives Jack seven minutes to show off the orchestral possibilities of amp violence.

Some of the raw grandeur of this record won't make it to the stage: The White Stripes are still a duo. They're sticking with that red-and-white thing, too. But with Elephant, their blues now come in living color.

Splendid E-Zine

George Zahora, Splendid, May 12th, 2003

So much has been written about the White Stripes -- ruminations on the power of ambiguously-related male/female duos, discussions of their Target-friendly red/white color scheme, rambling tripe about chicken restaurants, and so forth -- that it's almost impossible to approach Elephant on the strength of its merits. Too many people have too much to say about it, and most of what they have to say has nothing to do with whether or not you'll actually like the record.
Here's the crucial question: if someone gave you a taped or burned copy of Elephant, would it inspire you to run to the record store and drop $18.99 (list) on an art copy? Yeah, probably -- and I say that as someone who's been largely indifferent to Jack and Meg 'til now. While much of Elephant sounds, predictably, like four-track Led Zeppelin demos re-imagined on a seven figure budget, there are enough jaw-droppingly good 'n' bluesy rockouts ("Black Math", "Ball and Biscuit", "Hypnotize") to justify the purchase price. There's also the gloriously skewed "Well It's True That We Love One Another", in which Jack and Meg engage in faux-blues call-and-response silliness with the inimitable Holly Golightly. Too bad there aren't more songs here like it; much of Elephant plays like an extended piss-take where the audience's cue to laugh has been removed. There's plenty of nudging and winking but we aren't in on the jokes. Or perhaps we are: the thought of Jack White as a power-player in the world's taste-making stakes, for instance, is pretty funny when you think about it.

Elephant isn't one of those albums that'll change your life, or your tastes, or even the face of your music collection -- it's just a strong and consistent collection of powerful rock songs. That's reason enough to listen.

Colin McElligatt, Stylus Magazine, September 1st, 2003

When I see them plastered all over today’s music magazines as rock’s new saviors, I want to grab the offending article’s writer, shake him or her like I’m the only sane guy in an insane world (think 12 Monkeys) and yell “The White Stripes aren’t special!”, because, let’s face it, they’re not. Had they formed, released their records, and broken up five years ago, a hell of a lot of us wouldn’t know who they are. They’ve never recorded anything less than mediocre, but I can’t point to anything besides the 90 magical seconds of 2002’s best single, “Fell In Love With A Girl,” that points to brilliance. If anyone is going to save rock (from what, exactly, I don’t know) they’d better step up to the plate with more than the same handful of blues riffs, a modified Robert Plant yelp, and endearingly shoddy drumming. By this virtue, though, it’s entirely possible that they’re just the luckiest band in the world. If that’s true, then Elephant, their first record since curiously exploding into the mainstream sometime last year, is a monument to that luck. What other indie duo could travel the world to record an album with any instrument they would ever want and actually get rich for it? And what other band could be in the position to make the same album they’ve made thrice over and never for a second lose their savior status? Just one, apparently.

Although it somehow scored a slot in NME’s list of the top 100 albums of all time months ago, there’s nothing on Elephant that indicates that anyone will really remember it ten, or hell, even five years from now. By this point, calling a White Stripes record “their best yet” serves little to no purpose. The throbbing bass, Meg White vocal turns, and multi-tracked choirs may try to tell you otherwise, but when it comes down to it, I can’t bring myself to find any base differences between Elephant and White Blood Cells or De Stiljl, the two records that most would interchangeably call their zenith. In the end, with the winning formula the duo has undeniably concocted, that’s not really all that much of a bad thing, but it certainly calls into question why anyone other than the group’s hardcore fans should give this album more than the mere passing glance that it admittedly deserves.

From its opening bars of stop/start low end, to the motivational tape samples, to the aforementioned multi-tracking, Elephant just screams and begs to be viewed as a departure from the Stripes’ well-known approach. The problem is that in between all this commotion lie the same vintage jams that the group has trafficked in for years. “Seven Nation Army,” the opening track and first single, fares the best, with its muted insistency and Jack White’s inspired vocal turns. “You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket,” a detached solo turn from Jack, is another highlight, calling to mind the darker reaches of The White Album (no pun intended.) “Cold, Cold Night” sees Meg take to the mic for the first time and, if nothing else, succeeds simply but not sucking. “It’s True That We Love One Another,” a countrified real-life exchange between the Whites and Holly Golightly breezes by not only on its cunning aplomb, but with some killer finger-snaps, to boot.

Yet, from there on out, it’s a veritable forest of recognizable licks and that same damn quarter-notes-on-the-ride-cymbal-two-and-four-on-the-snare drum part. “Hypnotize” is embarrassingly similar to “Fell In Love With A Girl,” but totally lacks the latter’s cool-as-fuck joie de vie. “The Air Near My Fingers” quickly calls to mind White Blood Cells’ “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground,” yet is devoid of much discernable thrill. “Black Math” nearly squanders a nice Motorhead-molded guitar boogie on a tired refrain that sounds good until you realize you’ve heard it before-- could’ve been on this record, but who really knows at this point. When it’s not spurting out flaming-hot, kick-ass guitar solos, the seven minute “Ball and A Biscuit” has its head turned closer to the now-mythical Blueshammer than Chuck Patton.Still, all of this makes it decidedly hard to really dub this album a failure, because it isn’t. It accomplishes almost everything it set out to do, and does so with mostly admirable results. I want to go on about how I can’t discern this from anything else in the band’s oeuvre, but I’m sure, with careful study, someone could argue for the presence of some unapparent sea change. All I can do is throw up my hands in the air and reach for something that doesn’t frustrate me so much. Maybe it’s White Blood Cells, but after so many critical spins through Elephant, that’s hardly a desirable option. But besides, with their luck, The White Stripes don’t need me, anyways.

Chuck Eddy, The Village Voice, April 11th, 2003

Mr. and Mrs. Used to Be
Jack and Meg Find a Little Place to Fight 'Em Off

Success has made a failure of our home. Loretta Lynn said that; Elvis Costello covered it once. (Sometime later, somebody changed the words to "the mo money we come across, the mo problems we see.") Costello also covered "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself" once. As do, on their new Elephant album, the White Stripes—who like Loretta Lynn so much they dedicated their previous album to her, and are bringing her to Hammerstein Ballroom this Saturday.
The White Stripes open Elephant with a really paranoid song—paranoid about groupies, or imitators, or sycophants. Or somebody. "I'm gonna fight 'em off . . . They're gonna rip it off." Slow chords, blues notes, muffled voice eventually climbing in pitch. Ominous sound, tense and bothered. Slowed-down Little Richard in the chorus. Words about how a seven-nation army, which is to say a nation of millions, couldn't hold Jack White back. He wants to escape from fame, run away to Wichita. (Same state as Loretta's beloved Topeka, where one is a toddlin', one is a crawlin', and one's on the way.) A corny old travails-of-stardom song. It's the radio single right now, and it doesn't say what the seven nations are. Which seems rather sneaky, given the War With No Allies.

Anyway, now that the White Stripes are in a bigger room, they might not know what to do, and they might have to think of how they got started, sitting in their little room. So in "Seven Nation Army," and later in "The Hardest Button to Button," they deal with it. The latter's a boogie, a very antisocial one. And a marriage-rocker to boot—everything the White Stripes do best. "Now we're a family/And we're alright now/We got money and a little place to fight now." The room gets bigger. "It was 1981/We named him Baby/He had a toothache/He started crying/It sounded like an earthquake."

It's gotta start right in your own backyard. Dion DiMucci said that, in a song about losing his kids and wife to drink and drugs. And the White Stripes, Detroit domestics that they deep-down are, sing about backyards a lot. "The Hardest Button to Button" and "Little Acorns," which follows it on Elephant, are more vacant-lot ecology, more dead leaves and dirty ground to help us look at all the bugs we found. But when the acorn song opens with a moral fable about a squirrel saving up nuts for winter, I'm thinking it's about the Stripes preparing for their future. Which they should.

Besides being an out-of-left-field smash (which thus suggests that Clear Channel's war-mongering assholes might not be as monolithic as doomsayers say) and birthing some of history's shortest AOR hits, 2001's White Blood Cells was thematically of a piece, distinguished by Mr. and Mrs. Used to Be's best songwriting ever, much of it conceivably autobiographical. Which is to say it was, in some ways, a classic D-I-V-O-R-C-E LP in the Fleetwood Mac/X/Human Switchboard/Richard and Linda Thompson/Womack and Womack tradition. You get married in a big cathedral by a priest and if I'm the man you love the most you can say "I do" at least, but it's getting harder to find a gentleman to stimulate devotion. I read it all as Jack being more committed to the union forever and Meg not being able to help how a woman feels when the tingle becomes a chill. But art can lie, of course.

For instance: More and more, I'm convinced Jack is basically a one-man band. Meg, as wonderful a person as she seems to be, is an entirely replaceable drummer—musically, at least, if not conceptually. On Elephant, she fills in space competently enough when the guitar stops, but otherwise I forget she's even there. Though then again, I never understood why people make a big deal about Dave Grohl or Janet Weiss (neither of whom can swing a 16th note to save their lives), so maybe my standards are too high. But there are definitely garage-revival bands out there who dance like White Stripes don't—a half-dozen minimum in Detroit alone, and that's not even counting Jack's pals Electric Six covering Roxy Music's "Street Life" at the Bowery Ballroom last week. Better yet, play any six Elephant songs next to the half-dozen that end ZZ Top's Mescalero, which hits the stores this week, and tell me which band's got the funk. (Hint: The one with the bass player.) All of which, may I remind you, matters, since garage rock is about how nobody can do the shingaling like I do as much as it's about how sometimes good guys don't wear white. Thing is, Meg looks so cool. And it's beyond cool that my 13-year-old drummer daughter Cordelia wears pigtails like her sometimes, and has the White Stripes' photo framed in her room. But especially given how much White Stripes sound more like Led Zeppelin than like anybody else, Meg's got no brontosaur Bonham stomp at all. And not much propulsive Moe Tucker pulse, either. And when her voice sneaks out of a couple Elephant tracks, it's even blanker than her drums and her facial expressions. Somehow, across the board, she's figured out how to come off charmingly blank, which is to her credit. But mostly what her musical anonymity proves is that Jack White is one heckuva rhythm guitarist. And singer, too.

In "Little Acorns," he gives us a huge downbound guitar stutter, and vocal hiccups like if Herman's Hermits covered "D'Yer Mak'er." He's got this high, glammy vibrato, almost comical—intentionally tweedledee frilly and fey. (And has anybody noticed his increasing visual resemblance to Michael Jackson? OK, never mind.) So maybe "Black Math" on Elephant is a black mass, lisped. Unless it's math-rock gone blues. Killer divebomb fuzztone repetition, faster and faster, deeper and deeper, more and more pissed; Jack's learned over the course of four albums how to be heavy without being sluggish. He's developed this unusual knack for getting an extremely grimy slide sound into an extremely pretty pop song, for letting thick gangliations coalesce into melody, for taking cool explorations within a totally tight framework, for making his six-string ring like Salvation Army horns. He stated his aesthetic philosophy early on: "Crumble crumble/The bag is brown/Rip up the paper/To hear a sound/Pick up the pieces/Off the ground." His guitar style comes out of Jeff Beck, Roger McGuinn, Tom Verlaine, Neil Young, Angus Young. So whippersnappers who compare his band to Violent Femmes make no more sense than ones who say he's Jon Spencer.

Like all great garage-rock bands, White Stripes are omnivorous in their cover versions: Blind Willie Johnson, Bob Dylan ("One More Cup of Coffee," a couple years before Robert Plant covered it—on an Upper Peninsula road trip last summer, my kids got sick of me playing both versions in the car), Dolly Parton, the Kinks, the Premiers' "Farmer John," the Flamin' Groovies' "Teenage Head," Captain Beefheart's "Ashtray Heart," Robert Johnson via the Stones, now Dionne Warwick. On Elephant, "Hyptonize" might be my favorite song just 'cause it's the best dance track, not to mention a blatant Xerox of some famously distorted '60s proto-punk pebble if not nugget, though damned if I can figure out which one. And like any good garage album,
Elephant has more than its fair share of it-ain't-me-you're-looking-for-babe don't-hang-around-'cause-two's-a-crowd flare-ups: "The Air Near My Fingers," whose riff is pure "Wild Thing"/"More Than a Feeling"/"Smells Like Teen Spirit"; the even meaner "There's No Home for You Here," Jack in his verbosely faux-proper Ray Davies mode: "I'm only waiting for the proper time to tell you that it's impossible to get along with you." Massed, churchy chorus; muffled, maybe backward hook hinting at psychedelia like any antsy suburban hoodlums circa 1966. Waking up for breakfast, taking pictures, throwing garbage, breaking bottles, lighting matches: mental refuse of a pointless relationship.

By now, you got your white stripes on black zebras, your black stripes on white zebras, your black and white stripes on invisible zebras, and your invisible stripes on black and white zebras, and how can you tell the difference? Which is to say it just might be pointless to make qualitative distinctions between White Stripes albums—their 1999 debut, where Jack was still a bit too obsessed with the Anthology of American Folk Music, and from back when he hadn't quite figured out yet how to make his blues pop enough, is barely a notch below the later three, which are all too close to call. Like all those TRL teens, I assume White Blood Cells will always be my first pick because it's the first one I ever heard. But all the hardcore garage hipsters I know who heard De Stijl first prefer that one. And in the long run Elephant may be no different.

Certain facets are missed on the new one, though. The second side (on the vinyl version, sent to critics back in February to thwart downloads, which didn't work) is the dullest sequence they've put together since tracks five through 11 on their debut. There's nothing as dark as the 300 people living out in West Virginia who ended White Blood Cells (and who always made me think of "The Ballad of Hollis Brown"), and nothing as beautiful as the jousting-faire folk-rock of "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" or "The Same Boy You've Always Known," and no stompin'-our-feet-on-the-wooden-boards barn-dance beats worthy of "Hotel Yorba." Could use more Dock Boggs country-blues dirt, too, about how your Southern can is mine in the mornin' and when I find you mama you'll feel my hand (and maybe lose your heart on the burning sand) and if I catch you in the heart of town gonna make you moan like a graveyard hound. I mean, Jack's sounding increasingly precious in interviews, spouting confused aesthetic theories that he'd stated more succinctly way back when he named De Stijl after an art movement built on straight lines and primary colors. And now he's babbling about the return of the gentleman and sweetheart like he's Beck's little Delta brother. But fact is, some of his sexiest songs have never been gentlemanly at all—and what most saves Elephant from drowning in impending professionalism isn't good manners, it's hostile boogies like "Ball and Biscuit": very deliberate, all evil boll-weevil eight-bar George Thorogood have-love-will-travel backdoor-man jellyroll prowess, with ripping Crazy Horse headbangs thrusting deep inside. "Let's have a bawwwl, girl, and take our sweet little time about it." Read about him in the paper, or just ask your girlfriends, 'cause they already know. Not as heavy a heffalump stampede as Mastodon or Mammoth Volume, maybe, but at least as heavy as Black Keys.

So while Elephant may not be the subspecies of pachyderm that never forgets, it's at least the kind where you'll be as clueless as all those blind guys from India if you only concentrate on its tusks or tail. And if it's got a big trunk, let me search it. Side two really does worry me, too. To wit: (1) "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself," never one of Bacharach-David's (or Warwick's) best songs. Once presaged Elvis Costello's own eternal descent into meaningless good taste. (2) "In the Cold Cold Night." Sung cold and detached, by Meg. Sounds merely spare and retro—not a big stretch from what's wrong with Adult Alternative Radio. You could imagine it on a Nick Hornby soundtrack; that's how "pure" it is. (3) "I Want to Be the Boy to Warm Your Mother's Heart." Ornate, dainty little chamber-room figure eights. Yet another forlorn bid for the Aimee/Norah/O Brother crowd, which I hope White Stripes get (though if Beck's mellow record didn't even get him there, good luck). Sitting in her backyard (see?!) for hours, and Mama baked a cake. A couple albums ago, Jack broke rules just so a cute classmate would notice him; now he's inclined to finish high school (and turn cartwheels) for the same reason. He wants to be the kind of guy who tries to win you over. (4) "You've Got Her in Your Pocket." Not as good a boy-to-boy advice song as "Don't Mug Yourself" by the Streets. Again, slow and atmospheric and trying hard to be romantic, not in an especially coherent way. Jack's fine writing about commitment issues, but even when he hits his generally convincing high register here, he never quite engages.

He can be a real stick-in-the-mud, you know? At least when it's convenient for him. But then again, his conservative bent—his smelling a rat around little brats who disrespect their parents, his memories of elementary school as a warm safe place where as a child he'd hide, his know-nothing complaints about hip-hop being harmful to children and other living things—is frequently quite commendable; even comparable to the aggressively reactionary whiteness of punks back during disco. He can be a real sweetheart, too, as you might've noticed—in his old back-to-school songs, for instance, or that one where he told his little apple blossom to put her troubles in a little pile. And he's so straightforward, so unpoetic and vernacular in his language, and that's absolutely rare now. Elephant's finale is a jovially warmhearted, self-deprecating thing called "Well It's True That We Love One Another," where Holly Golightly of Brit post-pub cult heroines Thee Headcoatees calls him by his true name (shades of his fellow Detroit sometime-prude Marshall Mathers, who also knows that white blood sells): "I love Jack White like a little brother." Stuff about phone numbers written in the back of Bibles, and Meg sounding even more blank and bored up against Holly, which only makes it cuter when she confesses how Jack really bugs her. The song's jolly-good-cup-o'-tea coda is the sweetest way a Top 10 album has ended in, like, forever. And when Jack requests some English lovin', Holly says if she does that she'll have one in the oven. I'm expected, she's expecting. One's on the way.

© Frank Steven Groen