The white stripes

Get Behind Me Satan and the formation of Jack White's "supergroup" the Raconteurs were mixed blessings for White Stripes fans. On the one hand you had a solid album with some standout tunes and a radio-friendly classic rock band that showed new facets of White's musical personality. On the other, you had a mess of hit-and-miss experiments with marimbas and anti-electric guitar songwriting that did not bode particularly well for the future of the White Stripes and a group whose success threatened to end the Stripes altogether.

Icky Thump, the group's sixth album, will allay the fears of even the most skeptical candy cane child. Like Elephant, it is an album in the classic rock model, but Icky Thump successfully incorporates many of Get Behind Me's new directions into the heavy garage sound (as on the organ/fuzz guitar interplay of "I'm Slowly Turning Into You"), resulting in an album that covers a lot of stylistic ground and still delivers the rock and roll goods.

While the songs in the classic mold, such as spoken-word stomper "Little Cream Soda" and the savage "Catch Hell Blues," don't disappoint, the bizarre detours are in fact some of the album's best moments. "Conquest," an unhinged cover of a Patti Page song, places a mariachi trumpet over Jack's aggressive guitar grind, and "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn" is a beautiful, mandolin-accented Scottish folk song, reminiscent of "The Battle of Evermore" from Zeppelin's IV.

Led Zeppelin is hands down the most popular critical comparison when it comes to this album, but really, Zep has always been a major touchstone for the White Stripes sound, and Icky Thump is certainly no more the Stripe's "Zeppelin album" than Elephant was.

Meg may be no John Bonham, but her drumming continues to function as the ideal counterpoint to Jack's voice and guitar. Her detractors have always been blind to the fact that no other drummer would fit the band's sound and stylistic aesthetic.

Icky Thump is an amazingly solid album because it succeeds both at stretching out and sticking to the tried-and-true. In the White Stripes, we are lucky enough to have a truly great rock band in the midst of a truly classic period.