Icky Thump

"Icky Thump" opens with an organ riff that sounds like a fairground possessed — Jack White layering a Univox synth over a distorted, staggering blues stomp, Meg's drums hitting like a hammer on sheet metal. This is the White Stripes at their most maximal, having abandoned the ascetic red-and-white minimalism for something grimier and more baroque, recorded fast and hot in Nashville. Jack's guitar tone is genuinely ugly in the best sense: fuzz that curdles rather than crunches, solos that shriek up into feedback and stop dead. His vocal is a strangled yelp, a white-boy blues holler pushed until it cracks. The lyrics start as a druggy hotel-room encounter — "a red-headed señorita" — then swerve hard into a sneering broadside about American immigration hypocrisy, "why don't you kick yourself out, you're an immigrant too." Coming in 2007 from a Detroit band that had made its name reanimating Delta blues, that political turn felt earned rather than tacked-on. It's a song for driving too fast with the windows down, or for anyone who wants proof that garage rock could still be genuinely unruly after a decade of imitators had sanded the genre smooth. Loud rooms only; it dies on laptop speakers.