probabilityfields

Okay, they haven’t been out of the picture that long and Jack White has been rocking out with the unfortunately-named Raconteurs, but after the unremarkable transition album Get Behind Me, Satan you kinda want, well, a transition.

Remember when everyone was discovering Elephant and working their way back through the rest of the catalog? Remember the first time you heard “You’re Pretty Good Lookin’ (For A Girl)?” There was a magic to that year that made the rebirth of rock n’ roll seem not only inevitable, but untainted. Flash forward a few years and we can barely hear the reverb of dirty Airline guitars. It’s been replaced by excess, by coke-soaked dance-pop disguised as rock, and I’ll be the first to admit I enjoy it sometimes, but I don’t dream about it.

The White Stripes have a new album set for release in June. It’s called Icky Thump. A name which is just British enough to whet my appetite. More reason for hope though is something Jack White said about the album in Mojo Magazine:

White describes the album as “really heavy. There’s a couple of one-take numbers in there, people who love our first album will dig those songs. But there’s also some of the most complicated stuff we’ve ever done. Of course, complicated for The White Stripes means three instruments playing at once.”

I love the first album!

“There’s a bagpiper on the record! And we let electric guitar and trumpet battle it out on one song, call and response-style. It’s pretty intense.”

Could be good, could be bad. Here’s what’s in my mind: Bagpipe = Korn, Trumpet = Awesome. For some reason I’m reminded of an old MTV promo in which a mariachi band plays the Cranberries’ “Zombie.” Those were the days.

So if this album stinks or is even mediocre it’s gonna complete my crestfall. But I think I’ll know exactly why. It’s been my complaint for a while that The White Stripes were misrepresented by the media, the fans, and even themselves. They weren’t a magical almagamation of The Velvet Underground and Robert Johnson. They were the post-punk early Led Zeppelin. And early Led Zeppelin is exactly what we need right now, drums that make us dance, screams that make us cry, and big fucking brown note from a guitar that makes us, well, shit ourselves. Here’s to hope!

It must have been around the time of the X Files final episode that the hip train left the station without any UFO buffs on board. Hell, there was once a day when you were nothing if you couldn’t drop a name like “the Cigarette Smoking Man” into a pick-up line. But somewhere along the way increasingly complex paranoid delusions became passé. Let’s face it, once the G-Men packed up their antimatter and left Groom Lake we all should have known there and then that the days of The Lone Gunmen spin-off were numbered.

But this week, in a typically out-of-touch move the French government attempted to inject some much needed UFO buzz into mainstream news by releasing all their files (apparently they don’t call them dossiers) on the subject. If you’re like me, the story sparked a long-forgotten chunk of the imagination; unfortunately, mine must have atrophied, because there doesn’t seem to be anything really exciting in these files. The great majority of the 100,000 cases were explained away as swamp gas or bad quiche, and the still unsolved cases are on par with a bad Fox special, only without the creepy soundtrack and the gripping narration of Jonathan Frakes to hold my attention.

I must admit though that I was a little intrigued by the really cool photo of mysterious purple streaking lights in the sky. But instead of being filled with thoughts of other-worldly wonder, my grown-up mind forced on me a much more plausible, down-to-earth explanation for the otherwise resplendent phenomenon: Prince had obviously played an amazing solo on his uber-phallic guitar and spewed forth a purple plasma that scarred the sky.