Mr.Eyore's Full Review: Elephant by The White Stripes
There’s a story, likely apocryphal, that when Buddy Holly & the Crickets showed up for a live performance at a radio station that was playing one of their records, the programmer asked where the rest of the band was. He couldn’t believe so much sound came from only three guys. The reason I assume the story is apocryphal is because I’ve heard it told about Elvis Presley and his band, too. In any case, if that radio programmer were alive today and met the White Stripes, he would likely sh!t in his pants. If you listen to any of their albums, you will naturally assume that the band makes liberal use of studio technology to overlay multiple tracks that a mere duo couldn’t possibly duplicate live. But they do, and it’s a sight to behold.
An astoundingly charismatic stage presence, Jack White is a master musician who is at once a perfectionist, and a purist who makes a virtue of fretwork failures and the limitations of his own voice. Drummer Meg White keeps time about as well cracked Swatch, and she has a vocal range that extends across about three full eights of an octave. But she, too, has a strange, sexual charisma that derives, I think, from an expressionless boredom – and occasional puppy dog tilt of her head at ex-husband Jack -- more than from her Tammy Wynette fashion homages.
There’s a sureness in the White Stripes’ choices, many of which are quite daring, that sets them apart from the rest of the supposed new breed of young rock purists (The Strokes, The Hives, The Vines). There’s very little rock star preening or attitude adoption (musically); just a humble certainty about what they’re doing and why. It comes through.
On the other hand, Jack and Meg continue to play with the public perception of their relationship, especially on songs like “Well it’s True That We Love One Another.” But even more in the fleeting imagery that studs the album. They clearly knew what they were trying to tell us in every corner of the album, about relationships and the failures of love. The album title of course refers to that thing that’s always in the room – but ignored in spite of its obviousness – in failing relationships. The cover art features a weeping Meg, and Jack holding that ubiquitous tool of the gestalt family therapists, the Battacca bat. (You see, she’s the sad one who wanted the relationship to work, and he’s the emotionally distant one, keeping his anguish barely locked up)
While there’s never been any indication that the White’s personal relationship was fraught with the violence and bitterness of Richard and Linda Thompson’s, Elephant fits squarely within the glorious tradition the Thompsons started of laying bare, in sparse, poetic narratives, the death of a love affair by a thousand tiny cuts. This album is a proud philosophical and artistic child of Shoot Out the Lights: Beautiful, stark, at times heart-wrenching, and often perverse.
The Stripes have always known the value of opening an album strong (De Stijl’s “You’re Pretty Good Lookin’ For a Girl” and White Blood Cells’ “Dead Leaves and Dirty Ground” are among the band’s best efforts), and the opening track of Elephant, “Seven Nation Army,” is no exception. A mixture of heavy Cream, and light Stooges, it’s an ambiguous meditation on the White’s ambivalence regarding the media’s attention to their relationship (they have variously claimed to be brother and sister, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife, and exes, but everyone now knows the last of these is the only correct one). It’s a good thing, given the benefits they’ve derived from playing mysterious on this point, that the song itself resists real complaint, which would come off as truly disingenuous, and would likely undermine the remainder of the album.
“Black Math” is about as close to 70's punk as the band comes, and more than any song on this album, it features Jack’s unique gift for bending words a la Snoop Dogg, even if his actual vocal style comes across as some kind of wacky cross between Johnny Rotten and the Sparks.
Unlike their previous efforts, though, Elephant gets stronger the further in to it you get. And tracks 3 through 7 are as good and cohesive thematically, in spite of being eclectic musically, as any five songs I’ve heard strung together in at least five years. And I’m being conservative with that estimate.
I wanted to describe “There’s no Home For You Here” as operatic-blues. But really it’s just straight sped-up blues, with a chorus straight out of Queen’s A Night at The Opera. I suppose there’s a difference. It’s one of the two songs on the album that contains one of those moments when the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and they stay up for a good thirty seconds:
Completely baffled by the backward indication
That an inspired word will come across your tongue
Hands moving upward to propel the situation
Have simply halted and now the conversation’s done
I’m only waiting for the proper time to tell you
That it’s impossible to get along with you
It’s hard to look you in the face when we are talking
So it helps to have a mirror in the room
I’ve not been really looking forward to the performance
But there’s my cue and there’s a question on your face
Fortunately I have come across an answer
Which is go away and do not leave a trace.
“I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself,” a pretty run-of-the-mill break-up song, but for Jack’s weepy falsetto, will likely be their biggest hit off this album. The radio and arena friendly chorus (‘Like a summer rose, needs the sun and rain, I need your sweet love, to beat love.away”) will likely bellow from radios tuned to alt-rock stations throughout the summer. It’s the sort of song that was made for Jack’s pained, spastic, Joe Cockeresque stage convulsions.
The most shocking thing on the album may be Meg White taking over lead vocal duties, and cribbing from Peggy Lee’s “Fever,” on the “In the Cold, Cold Night” Meg’s obviously no Peggy Lee (and hardly anything could be as perfect as “Fever”) but she makes the most of what she has to make a haunting ballad of this dark, organ backed song, and it works.
“I Want to be The Boy to Warm Your Mother’s Heart” may be the strongest song on the album, lyrically. It’s so evocative of a moment. The narrative, about a boy with a futile wish to overcome his girl’s parents’s disapproval of the union, rings true in every word. It may seem in a vacuum a small issue, this parental roadblock, but in the context of the entire album, it reads as one in a series of profound disappointments that eventually crush the narrator’s desire to do nothing more than love.
From the opening strums to the closing break in Jack White’s voice, “You’ve Got Her in Your Pocket” is about as lovely and pathetic as can be. For anyone who’s ever broken up with someone they loved, but with whom their lives had become inextricably intertwined, and dealt with the difficulties of maintaining a friendship in the face of new lovers and constant regret, the song speaks. You can almost picture Jack White standing in front of a mirror, giving himself the sales pitch about his own mistakes, and how he must redeem himself with the woman he couldn’t make happy in the context of a marital union.
The remainder of the album, while good, and sometimes great, is often cynical. While the previous songs are raw with emotion and poetry, tracks 8 through 14 come across as having been written by someone who needed to retreat to emotional detachment, faux sexual bravado, and the sort of clever gallows humor one expects from a talent that wants to fall back on his crowd-pleasing gifts.
On “Ball and Biscuit,” Jack adopts a Mick Jagger circa Some Girls vocal style, with an arrogant bravado that works a lot better over Robert Johnson blues than it did over Mick’s disco musings 25 years ago. In part, that’s because it’s so obviously the false bravado of a man trying to get by by getting some, and who needs to convince himself a little.
“The Hardest Button to Button” may well be the second hit off this album, but other than the line Now we’re a family, And we’re alright now, We got some money and a little place to fight now it just isn’t doing anything for me. Nor, really, do “Hypnotize,” “The Air Near My Fingers” or “Girl, You Have no Faith in Medicine.” The album finishes up with a big fu.ck you to anyone who thinks the previous 13 songs tells them anything about the inner workings of Jack and Meg White’s relationship. “Well It’s True That We Love One Another” featuring Holly Golightly (a marginal talent who opened for the White Stripes a couple years ago), while sort of enjoyable in a vacuum, feels like kind of a betrayal here. I mean, it’s a funny song (Holly give me some of your English lovin’, if I did that Jack, I’d have one in the oven, Why don’t you go off and love yourself. If I did that Holly there won’t be anything left, for anybody else) but after the so much honesty and lack of pretension early on, this faux-romance thing in Meg’s face feels like a big jerk-around, like they’re looking for a new way to exploit their relationship for extra press. That alone knocks down my esteem for the album.
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