White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan

Whether this is good or a bad thing, "Get Behind Me Satan" is definitely the oddball of the White Stripes catalog. I guess I, as a reviewer, can only speculate as to why this album relies more on piano and marimba (?!) than it does on electric guitar. Maybe it was boredom, a desire for something new. Maybe Jack White decided this was the best way to communicate the ideas behind these songs, or maybe he liked the sound and wanted to write sounds that would showcase it. Maybe it was to prove he had a few ideas he wanted to be able to claim as his own: when the fuck has anyone based as good a song as "Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)" around the marimbas?

Whatever you think of this album, it's definitely an interesting item, but the music is tricky enough that it's pretty much never the one I reach for. "Blue Orchid," is my least favourite opener of the four Stripes albums I've got. It feels too basic to be real, too obligatory a rock track compared to the rest of the album. Maybe it's Jack saying "Yeah, I could go on with this forever, but let's see what else I've got in store." In essence, "Blue Orchid" is kind of a lie told to get you into the album. And the first sound you hear after it's over is those marimbas tuning up for their first appearance, "The Nurse."

I make a big deal out of it, because it's a weird friggin' instrument to wedge into your album, let alone on two tracks. The sound you get out of them isn't very thick or substantial, yet they ring with a particular resonance. On "The Nurse," they plink along while an awkward electric guitar punctuates the background with groans. I like the lyrical metaphor of "The Nurse," which goes along with general themes of deception, honesty, truth and misunderstanding, throughout the album.

The better composition is "Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)" which despite its odd, sometimes overly-simple rhymes, gets a good rhythm and manages to fill out the sound of the marimbas with piano to reach a lush culmination of sorrow. I feel like, if that song had been recorded with the guitar, it would have slipped in my estimation. Not that the bells make it better but that it is the best usage of them whereas it would've just been an average guitar ballad. Maybe.

This is all interlaced with two of the best songs on the album, and perhaps two of the more celebrated yet underrated songs of the Stripes catalogue: the ebullient "My Doorbell," a piano-rocker with a wicked-simple chorus, and "The Denial Twist," which is pretty ferocious. Both of these songs manage to root themselves deep in the musical family tree where blues, rock and hip hop (yeah, I said it) are still part of the same whole. I think that's an underrated element of the band's arsenal: they've got rhythm. Dismiss Meg as a drummer all you want, but you can't confuse straightforwardness with ineffectiveness.

After these tracks, the album loses a bit of steam with me that it doesn't recover for some time. "Instinct Blues" is a pretty basic blues exercise, and "White Moon" is a bit too morose and wandering of a ballad for me without offering enough in return. "Passive Manipulation" manages to say more than one sentence repeated for 35 seconds should be able to, and you can take it however you want (including as nothing, if you don't see any value in it: it's only 35 seconds after all.)

"Take, Take, Take," is is a pretty captivating song, though. You can't help but get drawn into the escalating story of Jack imagining himself meeting Rita Hayworth and acting like a total fanboy, and maybe even feel a little bad for him even as Jack's songwriting seems to condemn this type of behaviour. It's pretty blunt, and the whole song seems to halt when it goes into the title-chorus. It's one of those rare moments, and maybe I'm alone in this, (and maybe Jack himself would disagree) where the band sounds a bit like Nirvana. Sure, this is way bouncier, a bit more precise, but I could definitely hear something like "Take, Take, Take" coming out of a more experienced, more worldly Kurt Cobain.

"As Ugly as I Seem" and "Red Rain" are a bit minor for me, but hard to dismiss, and the former benefits from the renewed focus I've got as a listener after "Take." It's a little in line with the more self-pitying moments of White Blood Cells, with its tempo perfectly capturing a sort of "cheer up, man" attitude. The song never does get a release, though, and the narrator is left trapped in his misery at the end, as seen by the repetition of the opening lines at the end. "Red Rain" goes way off the map, starting small with a tiny little guitar sound but getting hard and heavy quick. It's the best guitar song on the CD, and it's got some great lyrics on the themes of truth and lying: I advise you look them up. And you know, there's a song on this album each for Blue, White and Red, and if I were the type to read too much into things, I'd notice that this whole thing was recorded just after the re-election of George W. Bush, but as the band has never really been that explicitly political, it would be kinda stupid of me to pursue that line of thought.

The album closer, "I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet)" is one of the best piano ballads Jack's written. He gets a lot of great things out of that instrument, it's odd he hadn't used it more. Listen to the way the notes lilt and then halt to emphasize the lyrics, while his voice quivers. It signals a level of despair most of us think we've reached at some point in our lives, just inches away from rock bottom... but not quite there, if we're being honest with ourselves.

I think Get Behind Me Satan is sort of a necessary oddball of the White Stripes catalogue. It's a deliberately weird set of songs recorded in a deliberately weird way. Like I said, any speculation I could offer about why he did it would be useless, I only know that it happened, and it resulted in some music that was... unexpected, but okay. Okay, not great. These aren't the songs that are going to stay with me, that I'll be humming when doing chores or that I set my iPod to. That's the trade-off, I guess, because as a concept it works and yet as music it's less.

The ability to stick with you in your head is of course not everything in music, but it helps; music you're more likely to hum or sing along with is music that gets into you and that is easier to appreciate. The music of Get Behind Me Satan seems to keep me at a distance, intangible like the lover in "Little Ghost." When I hold it, I'm really holding air. Which is a shame, I guess: it's such an impressive experiment, such an interesting piece of work, I almost forget what the songs are actually like. I could go on and on about this contrast, but I'm not sure if anyone feels the same. I think a lot of people like this album because it's so different, and that's certainly a reasonable conclusion. That said, the album is creative enough that it offers you your own choice: take the music on its own, or just the experience of it being made, and in either one, there's potential to enjoy.

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