The White Stripes Elephant Review

Band of the moment, the saviours of rock and roll...something to write about in an age of musical mediocrity? The White Stripes can be seen as all of the above. The hype around the release of their fourth album has gone on and on, the critics' saliva is abundant...finally it's here. Can it really change the course of mankind as we know it? Lets see...

The music is mainly some sort of blues derived rock; gentle some of the time and very loud and explosive most of the time. There's a great cover of Bacharach's "I Dont Know What to Do With Myself", moments of intense punk rock ("Hypnotise") and a comedy ballad at the end. You're not going to get bored.

The album was recorded in East London and Jack White's holding a cricket bat on the cover, so maybe it's not surprising that a lot of the album sounds very English. The heavy riffs here are just so early Led Zeppelin. Quite often Jim even sings like an English person pretending to be an America, and on "In The Cold, Cold Night" Meg speaks and (unlike her drumming) comes across all fay and, well, sort of pre-Raphaelite in a down-town motor city kind of way.

And it's all so divinely confident, so f**k off sexy. In that sense it is better than the first three albums (which weren't exactly meek). Whatever they say in public I think this is a band which loves been loved, almost as much as they love making music - and they like that quite a lot.

At the centre of the music's drama lies the relationship between Jack and Meg, Jack likes to strut and shout and shout, proclaiming that he is the seventh son, but he's dancing to the ladies beat. (Quite literally). If it's true that the pair used to go out together, rather than be brother and sister, as they once claimed, splitting up has never sounded so good.

What else can I say in their favour?...They don't take drugs and they don't do yoga, they even seem to like themselves for what they are. Strange, camp blues-rock might just be able to save the world; all we need to do is believe.