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The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

The White Stripes

[#] White Blood Cells (2001)

Reviewed February 22, 2022

Everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.

(This is an album that was previously covered on the Rediscovering! Click the link in the table to read my first impressions, or read on for how they might have changed.)

It's the album that introduced the world to Jack White and His Stripes, a raucous garage rock rip stripped down to simply Jack's bluesy guitar and untrained howl and ex-wife Meg's powerfully rudimentary drum beats, and a mainstay of "greatest albums of all time" lists the world over. It's alright. The singles here and super catchy and universally excellent, and despite this album's blistering minimalism (the duo go through 17 songs in 40 minutes), there are plenty of strange, paranoid experiments like "The Union Forever" that do genuinely work in the White Stripes' favor. It's just that Jack's songwriting tends to be pretty uneven, and there's too much fucking around to warrant its classic album status.

White Blood Cells' best moments, like the barreling "Fell in Love With a Girl", the lumbering groove on "Offend in Every Way", or the childishly syrupy acoustic number "We're Going to Be Friends", are absolutely worth the price of admission. Despite the tinkerer streak, though, the Stripes just don't have 17 songs worth of great ideas in them, leading to moments like the irritatingly improvised "I Think I Smell a Rat" (which is mostly its refrain) or the-definition-of-filler "Aluminum" towards the album's unsatisfying conclusion. I suspect White Blood Cells' reputation has more to do with people's fascination with Jack White as an idiosyncratic creature of vintage analog rock revivalism than its merits as an album. Go listen to Rubber Factory if you want this kind of bare essential garage rock done right.

Essential:	Quintessential:	Non-Essential:	Rating:
"Fell in Love With a Girl", "The Union Forever", "Offend in Every Way"	"Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground"	"I Think I Smell a Rat"
White Blood Cells' Rediscovering entry

NOFI | LOFI