my name is mwd

Listening to The Hives’ album Your New Favourite Band made me want some more raw style rock music. Having seen some of The White Stripes on TV (notably Seven Nation Army and Hotel Yorba (sp?)), I popped out to get Elephant yesterday, and have been quite impressed.

The White Stripes, consisting of Jack White on vocals/guitar and Meg White on vocals/drums, has quite a bare sound, and Jack does crank up his guitar, as can be heard on the Seven Nation Army track that’s been quite popular. This raw sound goes through quite a lot of tracks on the album, and is really good, though I find the drums a bit over bearing at times. But there’s also some really good blues style tracks in there (for some reason Ball and Biscuit reminds me of The Hindu Love Gods, whose album I used to have on tape, but sadly no longer have). Also there’s distinct shades of mid-life Beattles there on You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket. Finally the album rounds off with a fun blues story acoustic track, which is similar to Hotel Yorba (which is on the previous album unfortunately, so I’ll still have to get that).

Although it’s taken me a while to get around to listening to The White Stripes, I’m really impressed, and think I’ll start seeking out some of their olderstuff now.

As an aside, this is also a lesson on the dangers of having music channels pumped into your home. When an undergrad studying for exams I got hooked on MTV and started buying singles by the bucket, and half the time realising that I’d been fooled as it was more the video that made the song good rather than the music. My friend Brendon, who’s not usually exposed to such channels, was over recently and after watching Q Music’s channel for but half an hour went out the next day and bought three albums based on what he’d seen. It was nearly four, but like me, he held off buying the Electic Six album. Gay Bar is such a hilarious track, but I have a nagging thought that without the video (which is classic, and I’m surprised they can show it before the watershed, and I’ll never look at Abraham Lincon the same way :) the song won’t quite be the same.