(V2)
It just makes sense that Elephant should be a great album. Riding high on the commercial and critical breakthrough of 2001's White Blood Cells, Jack and Meg White seemed primed to deliver a colossal album, continuing the Stripes' artistic growth and improving upon their already impressive back catalog. Unfortunately, on Elephant it seems as though Jack, buying into the hype, also felt he had a great album in him and tried too hard to deliver it. The result is a collection with many great songs that never comes together to form a great album, mainly due to a level of inconsistency never before heard on a White Stripes release.
On White Blood Cells-and to a lesser extent De Stijl-when the style of music fluctuated from song to song, it always felt natural and easy, as if Jack were just writing what he wanted. From the noisy pop of \Hotel Yorba"" to the acoustic balladry of ""We're Going to Be Friends,"" the genre-hopping never seemed out of place.
This contrasts greatly with Elephant, where Jack appears to be deliberately trying to see how many genres he can dress up in red and white. The best songs on the album are powerful, with avalanches of guitar, intense drumming by Meg and an overall fuller sound than any of the Stripes' previous efforts. In comparison to this, the slower songs simply don't stand up, and this ruins the flow of Elephant.
Also contributing to the inconsistency is the theme of the album, or rather Jack's approach to the theme. All songs deal with the loss of innocence, or as the liner notes put it, the ""death of the sweetheart."" Sometimes reveling in the newfound loss of morals, Jack also occasionally laments their disappearance and the result is nearly as detrimental as the scattershot musical style.
Take, for instance, ""Ball and Biscuit."" A swaggering, bluesy, menacing beast of a song about sexual conquest, it's followed by ""The Hardest Button to Button,"" a screaming portrait of marginalization. Then comes ""Little Acorns."" Kicked off by an inspirational sample of Detroit newscaster Mort Crim, the song is about moving past one's problems and ""hiding them in your curls."" This isn't artistic progression, it's schizophrenia, and it's another sign that Jack is trying to do too much.
And that's the problem. For all the good songs on the album, Elephant still is hard to get into because, until the final four tracks, there are never more than two quality efforts in a row. The middle especially lags, and the album barely recovers from the repetitive ""In the Cold, Cold Night"" and the uncompelling ""You've Got Her In Your Pocket.""
Still, it does recover, and Elephant is a very, very good album. For an artist with the talent of Jack White, though, a hit-or-miss effort such as this has to be seen as a regression and a disappointment. Maybe with the pressure off, next time the White Stripes will deliver an album that actually lives up the hype that Elephant is receiving. It's obvious they have the talent to harness the high points reached here into one mammoth, monumental album because if nothing else, Elephant leaves the listener thinking that it could have been a lot better.
