Jack's Back (Okay, NOW I get it...)

I've never been a big White Stripes fan, but good lord, this album is a monster. Consider me a convert. My review runs Saturday -- but here's a sneak peek...

Jack White is a man of wild, shrieking impulses. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if his alarm clock woke him up to the howling first minute of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song. Deemed by critics and fans as the next great guitar god, the 31-year-old ne’er-do-well plays and sings not from his head or heart, but from an unreliable region just south of his rhinestone belt buckle. Ol’ Jack sounds like he’s making it up as he goes.

White, whose influences start with the Delta blues and end in some filthy punk club in his native Detroit, can occasionally be restrained. He produced and played on Loretta Lynn’s masterful Van Lear Rose album — and made her sound like a hellcat only once or twice. Last year, his side project, the Raconteurs, excelled at ’70s-born roots rock; their debut, Broken Boy Soldiers, was endlessly cool and (relatively) safe.

But all bets are off when White reunites the White Stripes, the duo featuring ex-wife Meg White, who plays the drums like Bam-Bam wields a club. The new Icky Thump is the band’s sixth studio effort, and its very first on a major label. But if you’re thinking Jack will calm things down, maybe write a few hits for a larger audience, don’t bother. The man has just made his loudest, toughest, swarthiest album yet, a riff-stuffed jailbreak perfect for a game of Guitar Hero.

White is finally getting comfortable with his rep as a rock savior. Maybe he’s even believing it, too. That wasn’t always the case. On 2005 White Stripes album Get Behind Me Satan, he was prickly, obtuse, unwilling to give listeners great delicious slugs of his shape-shifting guitar. It grew tiresome in a hurry.

But on the new disc, he’s in more of a giving mood, turning his guitar all the way up and making that sucker sound like a rude, raucous member of the band. On the Stonesian You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do as You’re Told), he’s Jagger-Richards all in one, letting his heroes know that he’ll take it from here. The lumbering title track is pure Led Zep (everybody clear out for the raunchy guitar solo!), and again, anything Page-Plant can do, Jack thinks he can do even better.

White is like a punch-drunk pugilist prowling for a fight, and it’s both breathtaking and exhausting listening to him stalk the ring. He’s much more interested in what songs sound like rather than what they say. On the mariachian rumble of Conquest, a ’50s cocktail hit by Patti Page, White invites fast, fluttery trumpeter Regulo Aldama to wail away, and then challenges him to a duel. The guitar-horn frenzy is a marvel, bizarro but brilliant.

White is now a happily married man (to model Karen Elson), and perhaps as a result, a few of the songs are cozily built for two, with Meg contributing oddball vocals. Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn and St. Andrews are bagpipe-driven romps with a jiggy pace, White yelping “Li de li de li oh oh!” and that guitar punctuating everything with screechy glee. The talking-blues Rag and Bone is also a hoot, as Jack and Meg work your neighborhood, gypsy trashpickers digging for treasures (“If you don’t want to give it to us, we’ll keep walking by . . .”)

And on the larger-than-life blues dredge I’m Slowly Turning Into You, Jack and Meg fret that they’re losing their identities, that they’re becoming the same person. At first, Jack will have none of that, pleading “I like to keep my little shell intact!” and hitting us with a rebuttal of buzzsaw guitar. He eventually warms to the idea of becoming someone else, although not for long. We know better. Two songs later, Jack’s once again a musical miscreant, doing whatever he darn well pleases. And now, more than ever before, that impulsive mayhem pleases the rest of us, too.