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Not coming to a record store near you, is The White Stripe’s new euphonious collaborative musical opus Aluminium. “An album of English interpretations of great American songs, written by a great American songwriter,” hence the spelling (to further confuse Americans three I’s are used for the website either as a reference to Mr. White being the third Jack in his familial lineage, or to the fact that Aluminium has three states of oxidation).
Though there was much low-key industry hype surrounding the album’s release, it was uncertainty I felt as I entered my credit card details in the all too welcoming fields on the website, not sure what my seemingly impersonal purchase would get me. But this is the 21st century after all, the new millennium, where impersonality reigns.
“Aluminium is an album of avant garde orchestral recordings of music written by Jack White of The White Stripes,” I remember the promotional information promising. And on receiving my package in the post, opening it, listening to the first track – rendered into a near perfect theme worthy of the Mission Impossible franchise – I realized that the disc would deliver anything but the expected.
Produced by Joby Talbot and Richard Russell, the orchestral compositions are the sonic opposite of the pared down drum and guitar tracks that have made Jack White’s main band, the White Stripes, one of rock and roll’s it bands.
Never one to rest on his overly creative laurels, Jack White, who also plays in that other band currently creating buzz, the Raconteurs, welcomed the idea of Aluminium, which was conceived, fittingly, while Mr. Russell was listening to his iPod.
“June, Hyde Park, London. Listening to Andrew Loog Oldham’s ‘Rolling Stone songbook’ on my iPod, it’s good, but I wish it wasn’t quite such easy listening,” says Mr. Russell in an online diary entry on the project’s website. “Like a lot of music, it’s best when it’s extreme. I start thinking of the song Aluminum from White Blood Cells by The White Stripes, which is really extreme, it isn’t even a song in the traditional sense, it’s got no verses or choruses, it’s basically a riff which is relentlessly worked over, and it would make sense to me that an orchestra would play it. I decide that I want to make that happen.”
It would also make sense that Mr. White’s representative XL Recordings label would see the artistic, credible and commercial viability of such a project and happily grandfather it under the XL umbrella.
As you listen to the recording, the neurons in your auditory cortex—those sensors in your brain charged with making sense of new aural experiences—begin attempting to figure things out. They tell you that you like what you hear, but you have no visual association, no precedence.
If it were the new Shirley Manson album, on which Mr. White recently collaborated, you’d conjure images of the sultry pale pop singer backed by the members of Garbage. Instead, because the album is so un-Stripesish, your mind creates beautiful little films to which each track acts as a score; films that could be directed by the Wachowski brothers, or Hitchcock, or Mel Brooks. In other words, films similar only in their climactic scale.
The album is bursting with ethereal emotions – anxiety on track one (Aluminum); melancholy on track three (Why Can’t You Be Nicer To Me?); fear on track eight (Who’s A Big Baby?). It’s a perturbatious roller coaster ride filled with instrumental twists and turns, albeit a short one (most songs barely make it past the three-minute mark).
This most passionate response to the music contained on Aluminium was not lost on its collaborative creators. Another diary entry by Mr. Russell: “When Jack hears Aluminum, he jumps up and starts shouting. Meg is quiet and demure, as ever, but then I realize that she’s saying, softly, ‘this is amazing’. Then the song Aluminum segues into I’m Bound To Pack It Up, and I don’t want to look too hard, but I get the feeling that Jack is getting emotional, and Meg wants me to see.”
The only vocals on the disc can be heard at the beginning of track seven, Let’s Build A Home, when a barely comprehensible and tiny voice emotes something to the effect of, “Okay… you gonna sound in that books.” Its inclusion is as baffling as the track’s choppy, quick-paced composition, filled with sinkholes of silence.
Toward the end of album comes The Hardest Button To Button (track nine) which reminds the listener that, “Oh yeah, this has something to do with that White Stripes band.”
It’s the apple that didn’t fall far from the tree with its instrumentation sounding the way you expected the entire album to – like the philharmonic doing Stripes covers. The tune is the only relative disappointment on the album. Yet even so, it is only disappointing when compared to the other nine pieces of “hypnotic, repetitious, enigmatic” musical mastery.
To call this an art project, and not simply a musical one, would not be an overstatement. The disc is packaged with art cards designed by Rob Jones that feature trivial information on the album’s metal namesake (with purchasers of LPs receiving a section of an original silk screen print). And though one card informs you that, “Aluminium is the 3rd most abundant element in the Earth’s crust”, the album, its sonic equivalent, is limited to a pressing of only 3,333 discs (of which mine is number 2,422) and 999 LPs.
I should report that I was somewhat wrong about the impersonal nature of my purchase.
“Thank you for purchasing the album Dez”, read the electronically generated letter included in the CDs postal packaging. “We appreciate your support of the Aluminium project.”
For the price paid (almost £20 with International shipping) I would have been pleasantly surprised if the ‘thank you’ were penned by Jack White himself. But he is, thankfully, far too busy for that.
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+ also published on the PixelSurgeon website
