Mushroom Music Publishing

Just weeks before their ten-year anniversary (which actually takes place on July 14th - Bastille Day), The White Stripes return with the release of their new record, Icky Thump.

Icky Thump finds the duo of Jack and Meg White ever-changing, yet still remaining in their 'little red box.' Icky Thump is a sonically thick, modern sounding record which reveals its roots in American folk music at every turn. As the opening notes of the title track kick off the album, the listener knows he/she is in for an untypical-as-typical White Stripes ride.

The explosive title track leads into a downright country rock meld titled 'You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)' featuring a Hammond church organ blended with hard country guitar picking.

Batting third is '300 m.p.h. Torrential Outpour Blues,' a baton relay race of just about every blues style of the last hundred years crammed into one song. Meg White uses several stop-start rhythms to connect the disparate styles into one flowing piece of modern blues music.

Once the listener catches their breath from that storm, they'll need to inhale again as 'Conquest' begins. Once sung by Patti Page in the late fifties, 'Conquest' sees the Stripes' pit-heavy, bass-laden guitar against mariachi trumpet in a blistering nouveau flamenco number. The semi-climax, resting at the top of a mountain-climbed call and response between Mexican trumpeter Regulo Aldama (found in a Nashville Mexican restaurant) and Jack White's fastest solo on record, 'Conquest' is one of the few examples in modern music of these two instruments, usually unheard together, so violently juxtaposed.

After that, 'Bone Broke' evokes primal rock n' roll that could only come from the bottom of the Detroit river, and will firmly satiate lovers of the band's early 45's. In fact, it was partially written in 1998 for a four-piece band that never recorded it. Jack resurrected 'Bone Broke' and finished writing it at Blackbird Studio in Nashville, where Icky Thump was recorded.

The centre of the album revolves around a new inclusion to the White Stripes pantheon: bagpipes. Jack and Meg expose their Scottish ancestry and are clearly right at home recording in the round with bagpiper Jim Drury. 'Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn' sounds like a potential Scottish national anthem, with its lyrical reflection of the national flower of Scotland, the thistle, while its avant-garde cousin, 'St. Andrew (This Battle Is In The Air),' kicks off Meg White's first vocal performance on the album, and lyrically reflects a spiritual ascent and a rumination on mortality.