Having admired more than liked them (and sometimes my interest has failed to rise to even that), I'm pleased to note that Icky Thump is the White Stripes' best album yet. Loud, violent, and more emotionally inscrutable than ever, its pulse subsumes Meg's pathetic drumming and Jack's constricted guitar palette (forget what you read: squealing and plucking are the only tricks he can turn) into a giddily shameless ride through the last thirty years of popular culture. In Jack's world, Patti Page is bug-eyed Akim Tamiroff leering at Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil ("Conquest"); and since Led Zeppelin means shit to me, I can enjoy pretend that a make-believe Scottish border ballad like "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn" would fit nicely on the second side of Led Zeppelin III. Ned Raggett reminds us that the Stripers are as much an art project as a band -- like, say, Wire. Right, and Wire wrote some horrible songs too. They had a penchant for novelty numbers too. Remind me whether they recorded one as poignant as "Effect and Cause."