the white stripes: white blood cells

BY SAM FRANK

Hype and time as in Time, as in magazine, and also (w/s) as in New York. And rock as in overrated like only a young, purty rock band can be, the most overhyped band of the summer. Plus the whole family-affair-verging-on-incest thing. (The gossip flies. Are they siblings? Nope. Ex-spouses? Yep. I met a girl in Chicago who knew 'em when they were married and Jack was always cheating on Meg who was such a sweetheart and...)

I blame Radiohead. If you think Thom & Co. are saving themselves from rock and rock from itself, fine—have yourself a grand time—but if you think rock needs saving by itself, then here you are: the White Stripes, Detroit guitar/drum duo, not playing straight blues no more but rather blues into garage, into metal, into balladry...a.k.a. all the primal forms of rawk. Jack the Ripper, Jack the Redeemer, blah blah barf.

So White Blood Cells. Overhyped, yeah, totally. The shame is that it's a great album—just not quite there yet (flags toward the end, parts don't make a whole, etc.). The first half is near perfect: "We're Going to be Friends," a melter about ants, worms, dirty uniforms; "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" presses love up against the Trinity; and so on, a whirlwind of roleplaying rave-ups and weepers, all in a gossamer of innocence disguising just how weird Jack White is. He threads guitar curlicues between bang bang power chords, polishes lyrical fragments till they look whole, and patches three-minute epics out of incongruous parts, verse chorus verse bridge bridge bridge, only to sew things up neatly with "Let's get married in a big cathedral by a priest/Cuz if I'm the man that you love the most you could say `I do' at least."

This isn't yet the album, but after three of them, the Stripes show no signs of getting anything but better. She really couldn't be a worse drummer (but then, she couldn't be a better drummer either, so long as she keeps sticking out her tongue and banging as hard as she can). And he is leaping and bounding w/r/t songwriting, both lyrics and arrangements. Now he needs to extend his ambitions (or, God help us, his pretensions) to album-writing. Whether the first two dirty words will follow as the Stripes get deeper into the last remains to be seen. (Sympathy for the Record Industry)

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