The White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan

Herald rating: * * * *

This new White Stripes album, their fifth, comes in a limited-edition, double vinyl version. Although running only 45 minutes (which would have made a single album) it is tempting to compare it with similar double albums of the past: The Beatles' White Album, the Stones' Exile on Main Street, and Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes.

In each instance the artists were diversely productive but at the crossroads, and on Get Behind Me Satan it sounds as if Jack and Meg White are courageously exploring their options.

Their blues-based minimalist rock remains intact - the overlong Instinct Blues hijacks the electric sound of Chicago blues for a pub and stadium pleaser; the crashing opener Blue Orchid kicks off things in expected WS fashion; and The Denial Twist is a lyrically dextrous cruncher in the manner of Aerosmith's Walk This Way.

But Get Behind Me Satan also roams from romping bluegrass (Little Ghost), through the irritatingly catchy My Doorbell (which sounds like the Small Faces) to the ragged gospel-blues piano of the final track, I'm Lonely. On the acoustic Anglo-folk As Ugly As I Seem, Jack White successfully appropriates many of Robert Plant's vocal mannerisms.

Meg's mercifully brief Passive Manipulation is amusing, but reminds you why drummers don't often get a track.

Piano and acoustic guitar are prominent, and on the slightly eerie The Nurse there are marimba, maracas and piano with stabs of guitar and cymbal samples.

Get Behind Me Satan - shot through with religious references and lyrical twists - is different and daring. Given that the songs were incomplete before the sessions it is tempting to see some as Polaroids of possibilities, of templates that will allow them room to move.

The guitar grunge, white-boy garageband blues and slightly arch art-rock of previous years are all here, but have also served their purpose. So if Satan sounds in places like a holding action, it is also a map that suggests theirs is a journey still worth following.

Label: XL/Shock