The White Stripes
Elephant

THE REVIEW

Hello everyone, this is the first original album I've ever bought, so you can understand my need to review it. How can you not review the first album, when you have the chance? You can't indeed... moreover, let me tell you, this is a distinguished album, compact and lively like never before.

So, for those who don't know the aforementioned White Stripes, know that they are composed of two charming individuals, a guy named Jack White and a girl named Meg also White, who alone, sporadically helped by someone else outside the band (meaning the two of them), have the audacity to play rock, garage-rock, and blues-rock, even dabbling in country, and they do it very well.

When I bought this CD I was about 14 years old and understood even less about music than I do now, but I remember that it was love at first sight: anesthetized by the video for Seven Nation Army, sporadically aired on MTV (too sporadically, I would spend entire hours in front of MTV waiting for it to play), my head was filled only with that bass riff, those very psychedelic red images permeated with elephants and walking skeletons, and to top it off, an imperious voice commanded me to immediately buy that album... those were the days. I knew the Stripes only for that song, so I was utterly unprepared for what was in the album, and in fact, at first, the disappointment was atrocious. I was even ashamed of having bought it, and it took several months and sporadic listens to the whole CD to finally grasp its beauty. Now I like the album, and quite a lot: it's an album of somewhat minimal rock, but highly inspired. Indeed, these two alone, Jack on guitar and Meg on drums, are perfectly capable of composing music and performing it in a very lively and communicative way, putting ideas and arrangements first, and only secondarily technicalities and various frills.

From the first track, Seven Nation Army, it's clear that we're in front of a quality work, with that bass riff that grabs you from behind and is already a classic, but to focus only on that song would not do justice to this album, which continues excellently with Black Math, a wonderful and devilishly energetic piece that makes you want to jump on the couch and shake your head up and down violently. With the next track, There's No Home for You Here, things calm down a bit, and it smoothly transitions to the next and almost connected I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself, structurally tied to a more classic rock, before flowing into In the Cold Cold Night, a very sensual blues track, sung by Meg and immediately catchy. The next track is a little gem whose only flaw is that I'll have to write its name (which is lengthy), and it's I Want to Be the Boy to Warm Your Mother's Heart, one of my favorites of theirs, also because of the warmth transferred by the folk guitar at one point in the song.

To avoid boring you excessively, I would like to mention two other songs: Ball and Biscuit, a splendid, lengthy blues track and another gem of the album, and the extremely intense Little Acorns, which is somewhat the synthesis of what I expected when I bought the album.