White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan (Third Man/V2)
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The most obvious drawback, as Sasha Frere-Jones noted in the New Yorker, is that the sound of the record is “muddy and obscured, as if recorded in a room covered with wet felt.” What’s more (or less), Jack White has matched that muffle by putting a damper on his talents. On the Stripes’ last album, 2003’s Elephant, his loud and wild electric guitar helped advance the group past their backwoods amateur shtick, but here he relegates his ax to only three cuts, trading it in for acoustic guitar, piano, and marimba, all of which he plays competently–but no more.
Frere-Jones called the sonic shortcomings proof of White’s self-defeating adherence to the band’s “thirteen-songs-in-fourteen-days malarkey.” That “malarkey” is an essential part of White’s ethos of immediacy–an ethos that’s served him pretty well so far. Get Behind Me Satan knocked Mariah Carey down a peg when it debuted at number three on the Billboard chart, three slots higher than Elephant ever climbed. That success–the sort of success that lets you play a three-night stand at the Auditorium Theatre–is due not to White’s desire to shoot himself in the foot but to his mastery of song forms, and if you listen through the murkiness, White is more focused and ambitious than he’s been since 2001’s White Blood Cells. The approach he’s chosen works because Satan is largely about romantic constraints, a theme that makes the group’s musical restraint mean something. If this be malarkey, there’s method in it.
It’s also an artistic recommitment to the woman whose last name he took, his pretend “sister” and real-life ex-wife, Meg. Her skills as a drummer have been much criticized, but she’s essential to the White Stripes’ mission: their live shows have always been powered by Jack’s manic energy bouncing off Meg’s coy implacability and brute timekeeping.
White Stripes
