White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan CD

The White Stripes' highly anticipated 2005 outing, 'Get Behind Me Satan', features songs originally conceived in an acoustic context. Recorded at Jack White's Detroit studio, the album presents 13 songs, including the first single, 'Blue Orchid'. V2.

The White Stripes: Jack White , Meg White.
Personnel: Jack White (vocals, guitar, piano, marimba, tambourine); Meg White (vocals, drums, triangle, percussion, bells).
Audio Mixers: Jack White ; John Hampton.
Recording information: Third Man Studios, Detroit, MI (02/2005).
According to Jack White, Get Behind Me Satan deals with "characters and the ideal of truth," but in truth, the album is just as much about what people expect from the White Stripes and what they themselves want to deliver. Advance publicity for the album stated that it was written on piano, marimba, and acoustic guitar, suggesting that it was going to be a quiet retreat to the band's little room after the big sound, and bigger success, of Elephant. Then "Blue Orchid," Get Behind Me Satan's lead single, arrived. A devilish slice of disco-metal with heavily processed, nearly robotic riffs, the song was thrilling, but also oddly perfunctory; it felt almost like a caricature of their stripped-down but hard-hitting rock. As the opening track for Get Behind Me Satan, "Blue Orchid" is more than a little perverse, as though the White Stripes are giving their audience the required rock single before getting back to that little room, locking the door behind them, and doing whatever the hell they want. Even Jack White's work on the Cold Mountain soundtrack and Loretta Lynn's Van Lear Rose isn't adequate preparation for how far-flung this album is: Get Behind Me Satan is a weird, compelling collection that touches on several albums' worth of sounds, and its first four songs are so different from most of the White Stripes' previous music -- as well as from each other -- that, at first, they're downright disorienting. As if the red herring that is "Blue Orchid" isn't enough warning that Get Behind Me Satan is designed to defy expectations, "The Nurse"'s ironically perky marimbas and off-kilter stabs of drums and guitar -- not to mention lyrics like "the nurse should not be the one who puts salt in your wounds" -- make its domestic skulduggery one of the most perplexing and eerie songs the White Stripes have ever recorded (although Meg's brief cameo, "Passive Manipulation," which boasts the refrain "you need to know the difference between a father and a lover," rivals it). "My Doorbell," on the other hand, is almost ridiculously immediate and catchy, and with its skipping beat and brightly bashed pianos, surprisingly funky. Meanwhile, "Forever for Her (Is Over for Me)" turns cleverly structured wordplay and those fluttering marimbas into a summery, affecting ballad.
But despite Get Behind Me Satan's hairpin turns, its inspired imagery and complicated feelings about love hold it together. Though "the ideal of truth" sounds cut-and-dried, the album is filled with ambiguities; even its title, which shortens the biblical phrase "get thee behind me Satan," has a murky meaning -- is it support, or deliverance, from Lucifer that the Stripes are asking for? There are pleading rockers, like the alternately begging and accusatory "Red Rain," and defiant ballads, like "I'm Lonely (But I'm Not That Lonely Yet)," which has a stubborn undercurrent despite its archetypal, tear-in-my-beer country melody. Even Get Behind Me Satan's happiest-sounding song, the joyfully backwoods "Little Ghost," is haunted by loving someone who might not have been there in the first place. The ghostly presence of Rita Hayworth also plays a significant part on the album, on "White Moon" and the excellent "Take, Take, Take," a sharply drawn vignette about greed and celebrity: over the course of the song, the main character goes from just being happy to hanging out with his friends in a seedy bar to demanding a lock of hair from the screen siren. AsSpin (p.63) - Ranked #18 in Spin's "40 Best Albums Of 2005" - "[The disc] feels less like a middle finger than an attempt to insulate the group from the bruising limelight."
Spin (p.101) - "[Jack White] manages to make songs that sound like harnessed truths, which is why the White Stripes generally make the best records in the contemporary world." - Grade: B
Uncut (p.88) - 4 stars out of 5 - "White stays true to the band's aesthetic vision, while mapping multiple paths away from stagnation..."
CMJ (No. 916, p.4) - "Seems Jack and Meg have been spending time in the nursery fiddling with their old xylophones and marimbas in between their routine bloozeouts, power-pop aerobics and local band beat-downs."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.60) - Ranked #14 in Mojo's "The 50 Best Albums Of 2005" - "[L]acerating blues and stricken balladry."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.94) - 3 stars out of 5 - "'My Doorbell' is catchier than a four-pronged trout fly. 'Little Ghost' is an Appalachian knees-up straight out of the Harry Smith handbook."