The White Stripes - Icky Thump

I completely disagree with you, White Stripes suck, Stylus sucks, Marilyn Manson for President, blah blah blah. Everybody I know thinks that the White Stripes suck, but everybody I know has at least two of their albums, so I guess they're our Rolling Stones by default. Haven't listened to this one yet, probably will at some point since I really liked "Get Behind Me Satan", but it seems as though the general critical consensus for this album is a shrug and a "Let's promise ourselves to put it on our year-end list and forget about it until then". And is "Icky Thump" a kind of VD, or what?

Fact-checking: - They're not in mariachi gear, they're in pearl suits. A Cockney thing from the Victorian era. - The ethnic oddities aren't gone. Bagpipes and a Mexican trumpeter ferchrissakes. - The White Stripes have always made weird albums. They've just been weird in different ways. - White Stripes fans who started with Elephant value the band for all the wrong reasons. This is a great album, as was Get Behind Me Satan, as was White Blood Cells, as was The White Stripes. The rest is chaff. I'm glad I didn't have to wait until LP7 for an album I could be proud of.

"You Don't Know What Love Is" sounds like The Darkness. I like.