| The White Stripes are back with the most bombastic album they've ever produced! While revealing the band's roots in American folk music, Icky Thump is an explosive, revolutionary assault that brings together garage rock, every blues style of the past 100 years, nouveau, and flamenco. This is truly a modern rock and roll masterpiece! The White Stripes Photos More from the White Stripes 
Elephant | 
White Blood Cells | 
The White Stripes | 
Get Behind Me Satan | 
De Stijl | 
Walking With A Ghost + 4 Live Tracks | 
The Document | 
Candy Coloured Blues | 
Rhinoceros |
| Bagpipes, a song written as the soundtrack to a Michel Gondry music video, Patti Page's musical shadow, and Jack and Meg co-narrating a scavenger's rummages: It must be time for Icky Thump, the many-flavored riposte to 2006's Get Behind Me Satan. The duo starts big with the title track--Jack's fast-tumbling, falsetto-tinged lyrics jagging on hyper keyboard-sounding segues and Meg's pounding drums. They rarely shy from an idea, invoking acoustic Bob Dylan to frame "300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues," but interjecting a series of distortion-laden guitar paroxysms for good measure. The end of Icky, on "Effect and Cause," is where Jack's trademark vocal warble and spare, quick acoustic strums meet Meg's single-minded beats. Everywhere on Icky giant riffs leap and shout, with Flamenco horns and those eerie bagpipes and rhythmic shifts and Jack's impatient vocal kinetics, marking new territories even as the White Stripes again populate them with vintage ideas. --Andrew Bartlett |
Customer Reviews |
 don't like it - and i am a HUGE fan 2009-01-04 |
| By aaronlws (NYC) |
| i like all previous white stripes albums. i have seen them live a couple of times - but i don't like this album even a little bit. |
| Classic rock gods! Screw Stones, ACDC, and Zeppelin! 2008-12-27 |
| By Chad Kroeger's #1 Fan |
These 2 musical genius are the founders of classic rock. Who needs Led Zeppelin, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, REO Speedwagon, Styx, Boston, and Cream?!
2 words.
White Stripes.
2 more words.
Musical Geniuses! |
 Good one 2008-12-01 |
| By Z. Kemenyfi (Budapest, Hungary) |
| Very good product, although the previous LP's I think were bettter. Thank you anyways. |
| their worst 2008-10-08 |
| By Michael (Syd, Aus) |
I remember when this album was being recorded and they put a clip online of them recording "i'm slowly turning into you", which i thought was a great song and made me really excited about the album coming out. When it came out, i bought it, listened to it twice and was totally disappointed by it.
Today, a year and a bit after listening to it i thought i'd pull it out and listen to it again. My views haven't changed much since then, i still think it's a dull, uninspired affair, but i think if you took off "conquest", "prickly thorn", "st. andrew" and "rag and bone" (throwaway tracks in my opinion) and put better tracks in their place, the album wouldn't be as bad. Yes, there are afew good moments, but all up it's a pretty meh thing which is like a step back for them.
I still think Get Behind Me Satan is their best. While maybe one or two of the songs on GBMS is disposable, most of icky thump is disposable, and only "300mph torrential outpour blues", "little cream soda", "slowly turning into you" and "martyr for my love for you" are salvageable from the messy dullness and fit in the same level of compositional and performance quality (not so much technical skill as energy and emotion) of Get Behind Me Satan.
The album also sounds rushed, like they didn't have time to even finish writing the songs (despite the fact that the press release said "this was the longest time the white stripes ever spent recording an album") white blood cells, which was recorded in 3 days still has more cohesion and awesome songs than this, despite the fact that most of the songs WERE unfinished (or barely finished - i remember reading that Meg didn't feel as though they should have recorded WBC so soon after writing the tracks with barely any time to practice or fix them) and for icky thump they just pulled out some riffs and melody lines that they had used before. The second track has snatches of melody line from "i'm lonely but i ain't that lonely yet" and sounds like a ripoff of both "dead leaves and the dirty ground" and "there's no home for you here". I found that especially irritating.
I think Jack White has lost abit of that songwriting magic that made the white stripes good. Hopefully their next album won't be this bad.
to summarise icky thump:
4 really bad tracks which they should have replaced
5 uninspired meh tracks with not much going for them
4 white stripes quality tracks, up there with GBMS or elephant. |
 Not their best. 2008-08-02 |
| By A. Bubrow (New York, NY USA) |
| For me, the White Stripes can do no wrong. And while they didn't do wrong with Icky Thump, they didn't do their best either. If I had to choose a couple cuts to recommend, I'd pick "You Don't Know What Love Is" and "Effect and Cause." |
|
|