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Tall tales, campfire singalongs and Oldham slang: the White Stripes’ 20 best songs – ranked!
As Meg White turns 50, we select the ‘sibling’ duo’s finest tracks, from garage rockers to childlike rhymes and de facto sports anthems
A highlight of their eponymous debut, and another song that feels intriguingly McCartney-esque, while also demonstrating Jack White’s innate abilities as a blues guitarist: the shivering slide playing lends an authentically spooky, haunted quality to I Fought Piranhas’ saga of striving against the odds. If you want evidence that Jack White was his era’s pre-eminent example of that most old-fashioned of things, a guitar hero, then Ball and Biscuit provides a particularly thrilling example: it’s all about the way the squealing, edge-of-chaos soloing that first punctuates the vocals, then consumes the final half of the song completely. But Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground is just incredibly exciting: there’s an audible swagger to its explosive surges – the sound of a band who are abundantly aware how special they are – and the lyrical protestations of undying love carry a weird creepiness (“every breath that’s in your lungs is a tiny little gift to me”).
Or read this on The Guardian
