Jack White — vocals, guitar, piano, marimba, tambourine
Meg White — drums, Timpani, triangle, percussion, vocals, bells
Best known for their hit "Seven Nation Army," this duo's fifth effort opens with a catchy, hard guitar riff and falsetto vocals that recall The Darkness, but by the second song, featuring opening piano and marimba rhythms, one realizes that the album is going to be quite diverse in the sounds that it features. Even lurking behind that song, "The Nurse," however is a dark rock heart that seems to be struggling to get free and burst forth in classic hard rock riffs that recall generations of earlier pioneering axemen and drummers from bands such as Deep Purple or Black Sabbath. Piano, however, turns out to be the order of the day on most of the album, providing an interesting contrast to Meg White's somewhat blurry (but always solid and effective) drumming. Maybe Franz Ferdinand meets Ben Folds with a little Coldplay thrown in would be an appropriate comparison. The overall effect is a very retro piano rock vibe for much of the album. After several songs in that vein, "Instinct Blues" is a jarring return to more of a hard rock blues style, but after the ear becomes used to it again, its guitar riffs are excellently crunchy while staying well within the blues idiom before the previous piano-rock style returns with Meg's sweetly sung vocals on "Passive Manipulation." The excellent "As Ugly As I Seem" adds further eclecticism and diversity to the album, very understated and acoustic compared to the rest of the album, with Meg's relatively subdued drumming complementing and not overwhelming Jack's excellent guitar and delicate vocals in what is quite possibly the best cut off the entire thing. The album ends by recalling Ben Folds Five's "Lullabye" with a splash of Vince Guaraldi, a fitting ending to an album that piano sounds come to define over the course of its tracklist.
Bottom line: Eclectic, and by turns bluesy, riffy and bombastic, the only consistency throughout is its excellence and musicianship-- 4/5 stars
