The White Stripes
Elephant [Deluxe]
THIRD MAN
If White Blood Cells was the album that made Meg and Jack White a psychically wounded but shouty, minor chord indie-blues sensation, Elephant pushed the duo further, faster, and into darker waters (and it’s the White Stripes album that has everyone’s favorite sporting event anthem, the drummed-hard “Seven Nation Army”). With all that going so strongly for it, Elephant may have been the last real mainstream (sorry, but let’s face it…) rawk-out album that mattered for a minute.
To celebrate its 20-year anniversary, Jack’s Third Man label has released Elephant as a deluxe package with a rip-snorting, blood-curdling 27-song live set recorded from the Chicago Aragon Ballroom stop of their 2003 tour, with the three-song volley of “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground,” “Lovesick,” and “Hotel Yorba” as this collection’s highlight. Mainly, though, you’ll be there for the remastered sound of a scabby record that all but blew out your CD player in the first place with its screeching vocals and gut-hurt, blues guitar–strewn cuts such as “The Hardest Button to Button,” the duo’s bruised-up take on Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself,” and the supernatural romanticism (and long guitar wank) of “Ball and Biscuit.”
There are some lushly layered production touches here—such as Meg’s choirs, Jack’s piano, and some breathy, Mercury-and-May-like harmonies on “There’s No Home for You Here” and the occasionally vulnerable ballad “You’ve Got Her in Your Pocket”—to shift Elephant’s already-shaky earthen palette. Mostly, though, Elephant is a woozy, raw-powered, Stooges-Doors blues delight—one filled with the sort of careening rock outs that fill the old-fashioned lyricism of “Hypnotize” and the snaky “Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine.” And Meg White, who we’ll never get enough of, makes herself heard on the whip-smart “In the Cold, Cold Night” and (with guest Holly Golightly) “It’s True That We Love One Another.”
