Shut Up And Listen 108 Chad’s Shitty Review Of The White Stripes’ Elephant Fuck Iraq for a week, I’m going to talk about a CD you should own. Elephant is The White Stripes’ fourth album and it’s their best yet. If you’ve heard The White Stripes before you won’t be really surprised by the album. I remember I first heard the first single “Seven Nation Army” on the radio one night halfway through the song and I knew it was theirs after about three seconds. But they’ve managed to take their sound, which was already at near-perfection and somehow improved upon it. The album came out on April 1, so it’s a couple weeks old, but I didn’t feel comfortable reviewing it in any detail until I had listened to it for a couple weeks straight pretty much. That’s when you can tell the truth about an album: after you’ve listened to it so much that you’re so fucking sick of it that you almost throw it out the window, but you don’t because you still really like it. That’s what I did with this album, not for the sake of this column, but because well, it’s a great fucking album. For those who have never heard of The White Stripes, some background info: Jack and Meg White are them. Jack plays the guitar and the piano, while doing the vocals, and Meg does the drums. The two are either brother and sister or were married (they don’t clarify that and no one seems to know for sure), but that doesn’t really matter. As I said, Elephant is their fourth album; their first three were a self-titled one, De Stijl, and White Blood Cells. They hail from Detroit, have opened for the Rolling Stones, and became rather popular last year along with bands like The Strokes, The Hives, and The Vines. I got Elephant the day it came out and listened to it straight through with nothing to distract me except for the lyrics booklet. First off, the album package is a very well-designed one. It features the same red, white and black colour scheme that characterizes the band, has the lyrics to all fourteen songs, except “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” which is a cover of a Burt Bacharach song, and also have some rather interesting liner notes about “the death of the sweetheart,” the album’s dedicatee. The White Stripes also want you to know that “No computers were used during the writing, recording, mixing or mastering of this record.” This album is the first to have vocals done by anyone other than Jack with Meg singing the fifth track “In The Cold, Cold Night” and Holly Golightly and Meg doing parts on the final track “Well It’s True That We Love One Another.” “In The Cold, Cold Night” is a cross between “Fever” and a 12-year old at a talent show. It has that nightclub sexiness to it, but Meg’s shy style gives the impression of a little girl standing up on a stage, totally scared shitless, not knowing whether to just belt it out or mumble. It’s a great song though. I’d like to hear her do more. “Well It’s True That We Love One Another” is as close as you can get to a spoken word track without doing so. It’s a fun song that goes back and forth between Jack and Holly with Meg chiming a couple of times. But as many have said, Jack is the star of the album. I think “Ball And Biscuit” demonstrates this the best. Honestly, I just get the impression that it’s him having fun. Most of the song is guitar solos by him and some cool lyrics. It’s a song where you can really hear the blues influence on Jack. The song though is a departure from their usual stuff in that it has guitar solos, which up until this album, they didn’t. Like I said, they’ve taken their usual sound and improved upon it. Just little thing here and there like guitar solos or guest vocalists, but they add a new dimension to the Stripes’ sound. The idea of them having fun really comes through in Meg’s drumming, which most critics seem to characterize as amateurish and not that technically proficient. My favourite description of it was comparing it to a kindergarten student playing the drums, not just as far as skill goes, but the energy and enjoyment of it. Yeah, she doesn’t show off, but dammit, it sounds like she’s having fun. There’s great energy in her drumming. It’s not like she sucks, she just doesn’t do all sorts of “tricks” (for lack of a better word on my part). She keeps the beat, which is the basic job of a drummer. They’re the backbone of the song, and often if they’re really good, you forget they’re there. My favourite song of the album is either “Little Acorns” or “Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine”. “Little Acorns” begins with a spoken word intro by Mort Crim about a woman who managed to get her life together after she saw a squirrel gathering acorns one by one to prepare for the coming winter. The song seems to be inspired by that and is a pretty fast beat song with Jack following most lines with Ows, Ohs, and various sounds like that to the beat (hard to describe songs with words, you know?). “Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine” is about modern medicines in pill forms. I love lines like “Is there a way to fine a cure for this implanted in a pill?” and “Don’t even need a drink of water to make the headache go away.” If I were to find something wrong with the album it would probably be the mid-album lull where they put all their slower songs right together. It slows the album down a little, which doesn’t have to happen. Also, the repeating of a piece of “Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground” in “There’s No Home For You Here” caught me off-guard. It’s just the tone of a small piece of music, and could have been done on purpose, but still strikes me as weird. Go out and buy this album despite my crappy review of it (I know, I suck at this). Definitely the rock album of the year so far, and the only thing that looks to possibly be better is the new Radiohead album coming out. This is rock music at its best, don’t miss out on it.