Album: The White Stripes

On their 2005 album, Get Behind Me Satan, The White Stripes broadened their instrumental palette to take in such exotica as mandolin, marimba and glockenspiel on songs written primarily on piano. With Icky Thump, they summarily abandon that palette, returning to the basic guitar/drums formula that served them so well before – albeit with a few new instruments nudging them in yet more fresh directions. There's the mariachi trumpet that accompanies Jack's melodramatic delivery of Corky Robbins' role-reversal romance "Conquest"; and the album's centrepiece pairing of "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn" and "St Andrew", Celtic-folk pastiches on which the skirling bagpipe drones of Jim Drury accompany Jack's mandolin as he pays tribute to the duo's Scottish ancestry.

Small wonder that he and Meg sing "Bring out your junk and we'll give it a home/A broken trumpet or a telephone" on "Rag and Bone": compared with their original pared-down approach, White Stripes albums now sound more like foraging expeditions through the world's musical junkyards.

The most startling sounds on Icky Thump, however, are the flurries of heavily distorted synthesiser that periodically slash into the title-track – the same synthesiser, it's claimed, that Joe Meek used to create "Telstar", and lacking none of its singular impact here. Similarly jarring shards of abstract guitar noise slice through several album tracks, too, their furious, strangulated tones lending a dangerous, barely controlled aspect to what might otherwise be considered merely footnotes to the Brit-blues innovations of such as Led Zeppelin and the original Fleetwood Mac. Just when a track such as "300mph Torrential Outpour Blues" is settling into a comfortably blues groove, its mood is shredded by the brittle, high-pitched noise that razors across the riff.

The material covers a broad range of subjects, from Scottish- and Mexican-themed tracks and America's treatment of its immigrant minorities, to a clutch of songs focusing on relationships, in particular, the need for change.

The theme of change is most directly confronted, however, in "Little Cream Soda", a blues boogie of disparate observations, all of which confirm how Jack's life becomes less satisfying as his outlook expands to accommodate adult responsibilities. "There was a time," he notes wistfully, "when all I wanted was my ice cream colder, and a little cream soda." These days, clearly, his ambitions have been supersized.

Download this: 'Icky Thump', 'Little Cream Soda', 'Rag and Bone', '300mph Torrential Outpour Blues'