MUSIC: The White Stripes As Bona Fide Geniuses

The White Stripes as pied pipers. It's amazing how easily we fall into step behind Jack and Meg White, although it's not clear they drop their smirking grins long enough to notice. On their cryptically titled new release, Elephant, as on 2001's White Blood Cells, Jack and Meg conjure an impossibly full sound from impossibly stripped-down orchestration and production. The liner notes claim that "No computers were used during the writing, recording, mixing or mastering of this record." This is easily as believable as the claim that Jack and Meg are actually brother and sister. Once the first track hooks, however, we don't care anymore.

Jack stars as swaggering demigod, declaring that "a seven-nation army couldn't hold me back." We are inclined to believe him. As if to prove that he is capable of spinning even the most inane melody into something unassailably cool, Jack interrupts his straightforward garage rock with a cover of the karaoke classic, "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself." Jack as bombastic Burt Bacharach.

Midway through Elephant, the Stripes take a running jump into what is arguably the high point of the album, "Ball and Biscuit." Jack as Hendrix-styled blues rock prophet. "It's quite possible that I'm your third man/ But it's a fact that I'm the seventh son/ And right now you could care less about me/ But soon enough you will care by the time I'm done." And now we will follow them anywhere.

The White Stripes emerge as contradictory as ever: Jack alternately delivers sincere sounding lyrics with an audible smirk and refuses to crack a smile for the high camp of lines like "Be like the squirrel, girl," in the delightfully straight-faced "Little Acorns." Meg hangs back behind her drums for most of the album, pounding out a foundation for Jack's squealing guitar departures, but then steps out to lend airy, unpolished vocals on the folksy "In the Cold, Cold Night." The searing guitar-induced frenzy created by the album's first 12 tracks breaks sharply on the final song, a comedic back-and-forth romp between Jack, Meg and Miss Holly Golightly, "Well It's True That We Love One Another."

Well, even if it's not true, we love them anyway.

• Macy Parker