Rocks In The Attic #119: The White Stripes - ‘The White Stripes’ (1999)

This album, the debut by The White Stripes, is very garage-rock. More so than their slightly more polished and better recorded later albums. The overall sound isn’t that different though - swampy blues rock spelled out with just guitar and drums, underneath Jack’s squealing vocals.

Meg’s drumming seems a bit better on this album, avoiding the mistakes and bad timing that she employs on De Stijl - suggesting they either rehearsed this material a bit more, or that Meg was simply a bit more comfortable with her parts.

De Stijl was their first album I heard, so I’ve always listened to this in retrospect. It lacks the direction that De Stijl has, and like most debut albums it suffers from that feeling of ‘let’s just get everything recorded and worry about everything else later’.

Hit: Stop Breaking Down

Hidden Gem: Do