Quick N' Dirty Reviews

The White Stripes/ Icky Thump
Expectations are a bitch. They can make a mediocre album seem like more when it clears a lower bar and they can make a good album sound weaker if it doesn’t meet a predetermined higher opinion. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook) for The White Stripes, their standard has been set impossibly high and their sixth studio release, Icky Thump, doesn’t quite measure up. Now, understand this – a mediocre White Stripes album is still better than 95% of what the music industry is coughing up these days. It’s just that The White Stripes’ past work has been so mind-blowing and transcendent that anything less carries the slightest whiff of failure, which is what Icky Thump smacks up against. The originality and inventiveness of previous triumphs like Elephant, De Stijl, and even the unjustly maligned Get Behind Me Satan are missing for the most part. Almost everything on Icky Thump evokes someone else: Black Sabbath; The Who; Led Zeppelin; Van Halen; Beck; shit, even The White Stripes’ own previous work. “You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You’re Told)” and “I’m Slowly Turning Into You are pure Jack White-filtered Led Zeppelin, right down to White aping Robert Plant’s vocal style, while “Rag And Bone” suggests Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher” if Eddie and the boys were turned on by dumpster diving instead of nubile educators. This isn’t to say that this batch of songs isn’t strong – quite the contrary. It’s just that it’s all been done before and to better result. It’s a given at this point that White is one of the greatest guitar players around but the ingenuity that he’s shown on past recordings is missing for the most part. The little imagination that White does muster up is marred by perhaps Icky Thump’s greatest weakness – its production. Ostensibly going for a rawer sound than in the past, White allows his guitars and fake sister/real ex-wife Meg White’s drums to bleed together in the recording, creating static that draws attention away from more than a few stellar songs and does its best to try to kill the album. Look – I’m all for sounding raw. Hell, that’s what The White Stripes are predicated on and it’s worked in the past, but there’s a definite difference between raw and sloppy, and Icky Thump dangerously skirts that line. No track illustrates this more than “Little Cream Soda.” It’s driven by an absolutely killer guitar riff, is one of the few wholly original tracks on the record, and has the potential to be one of the band’s greatest songs. Alas, the static that greets the opening and lasts throughout the entire track detracts from everything that’s good about it. “Icky Thump” and “Catch Hell Blues” are otherwise great songs that suffer from this poor production as well. I really don’t want to sound entirely down on the album. There’s definitely a lot here that’s worth hearing – besides what’s already been mentioned, “300 M.P.H. Outpour Blues” is pure Delta blues charged with a jarring screeching guitar effect that’s similar to Get Behind Me Satan’s “The Nurse,” and “Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn” includes bagpipes on a White Stripes record for the first time and could be a distant cousin of Zep’s “The Battle Of Evermore” – but in the end, the entirety doesn’t quite equal what Jack and Meg are capable of, making Icky Thump all the more vexing. It’s still better than most of what’s been released in 2007 but it could have been (and should have been) so much more.

Dirty Rating: 86/100

The White Stripes On MySpace Music
The White Stripes' Official Site


Tori Amos/ American Doll Posse
Tori Amos is a weird chick. Anyone who’s willing to be photographed with a piglet sucking on one of her boobies for an album cover definitely qualifies as odd. Thus, it shouldn’t be surprising that Amos decided that her latest release, American Doll Posse, should be sung in the guise of five different characters with each one representing “a different aspect of her personality.” Uh… yeah. Brilliant. Read more about this lunacy here. Amos’s psyche has long been fodder for her art and it would appear that she’s gone completely off the deep end this time as each “character” has been given its own separate name and backstory. The record itself is broken up into fifths that are sung by each character, yet as insane as this idea clearly is, it may have had the slightest chance of working had Amos arranged the album so that each character flowed consecutively into the next. For example, if all of “Isabel’s” tracks had run through completely and then lead into all of “Clyde’s” songs the album wouldn’t be as incoherent as it appears. Instead, Amos scatters the order throughout, creating a disjointed mess that’s incredibly hard for the listener to follow. It also suffers (like many Amos releases) from lasting about a half hour too long. At 23 tracks and close to 80 minutes, she would do well to hire a producer who believes in brevity the next time around. Because of its extreme length, the good tracks are surrounded by interchangeable filler that only serves to dull their impact. For every “Bouncing Off Clouds” (American Doll Posse’s best track that has an energy that’s lacking throughout the rest of the record) or “Secret Spell” (with its decent hook that recalls old-school Amos), there are countless versions of the same song (“Mr. Bad Man,” “Smokey Joe,” or “Dragon”), tracks that are bogged down by annoying choruses and/or insipid lyrics (“Body And Soul” and “Posse Bonus”), or titles that preclude them from being taken seriously (“Digital Ghost” and “Programmable Soda” – that’s right… “Programmable Soda”). It’s almost tragic because Amos is doing some interesting work by incorporating more guitar than she has in the past, leading to some of the most remarkable songs on the record, but they’re unable to stand out amongst the bland junk that’s present on most of American Doll Posse. Maybe if we ask really nicely one of Tori’s five personalities will be able to man up and tell her that less is often more.

Dirty Rating: 50/100

Tori Amos On MySpace Music
Tori Amos's Official Site