Pitchfork评测The White Stripes专辑White Blood Cells

It's been a long time since I've wanted to hear an album every day, let alone more than once a day. Sure, to make these review deadlines, I often have to listen to a record daily, but in so many cases, it's a chore. That's not a problem with White Blood Cells. In fact, the problem now is finding time for the next album to review; all I want to do is listen to the White Stripes. I've got it taped for my walkman in the classic cassette format-- it fits easily onto Side A of my 90-minute Maxell. I keep wasting precious battery power fast-forwarding through Side B so I can get back to White Blood Cells.

我已经很久没有想过每天听一张专辑了，更不用说一天不止一次了。当然，为了在截止日期前完成乐评，我经常每天都要听唱片，但在很多情况下，这是一件苦差事。这对White Blood Cells来说不是问题。事实上，现在的问题是找时间为下一张专辑做回顾;我只想听White Stripes，我已经为我的随身听录下了经典的卡带格式——它可以很容易地放到我90分钟的Maxell的A面。我一直在浪费宝贵的电池电量快进到B面以便回到White Blood Cells。

I love the rock and roll. There's always someone new coming along, taking that heavily rooted sound-- the music of the Gods-- and making the old beast sing anew. It's Christ and Prometheus, eternally dying and rising again. Jack and Meg White summon the Holy Spirit and channel it through 16 perfectly concise songs of longing, with dirty, distorted electric guitar cranked to maximum amplification, crashing, bruised drums, and little else. They don't innovate rock; they embody it. And whatever past form of the genre White Blood Cells invokes has been given a makeover and set loose to strut the lower east side's back alleys in its new clothes. Red and white clothes. (The Stripes could stand to vary the color schemes of their album covers.)

我喜欢摇滚乐。总会有新人出现，带着根源的声音——众神的音乐——让老野兽重新唱歌。是基督和普罗米修斯，永远死去，复活。杰克和梅格·怀特召唤圣灵，并通过16首完全简洁的渴望歌曲来引导它，肮脏、扭曲的电吉他被曲调到最大的放大、崩溃、瘀伤的鼓和其他东西。他们摇滚乐没有创新；他们体现了摇滚乐。无论White Blood Cells调用的流派的过去形式是什么，都经过了改造，并穿上新衣服在下东区的后巷大放。红色和白色的衣服。（The Stripes可以改变他们专辑封面的配色方案。）

There's no denying that the White Stripes fall within the confines of the garage rock band. Their music is simple, stripped down and it howls the blues. But despite its simplicity, there's something here that goes so much deeper. Jack White's mangled guitar screams like a rabid catfight, its strings massacred to the point of snapping. Meg White's kit is bashed with such force you'd imagine her as some kind of incredible hulk, though in photos, she appears the prototypical indie girl-- waifish, with pigtails and a nasty smirk. Yet she whips all of her 98 pounds into a tornadic fury like E. Honda's hundred-hand slap.

不可否认，White Stripes属于车库摇滚乐队的范畴。他们的音乐很简单，很简单，充满了蓝调。尽管它很简单，但有一些东西要深入得多。杰克·怀特(Jack White)那把破损的吉他就像一场疯狂的猫斗一样尖叫着，琴弦被屠杀到了断裂的地步。梅格·怀特(Meg White)的服装冲击力如此之大，你会把她想象成某种不可思议的绿巨人，尽管在照片中，她看起来是典型的独立女孩——腰小，扎着辫子，带着讨厌的假笑。然而，她把98磅的体重都挥成龙卷风般的狂怒，就像本田的百手巴掌。

Occasionally, Jack tosses an organ into the mix, or bangs on a piano like the Stones' Ian Stewart. But for the most part, White Blood Cells is instrumentally sparse, with only a guitar and drums. The last time I recall such a dense sound being wrung from rock's bare essentials was on Liz Phair's similarly Stones-inspired Exile in Guyville, though this record explores much raunchier sonic textures; rather than Phair's restrained but biting wit, Jack White opts to lay it all on the line, the unfiltered cynicism of an intelligent mind sent blaring through 1000 Hz of raw aggression.

偶尔，杰克会把管风琴放进混音中，或者像Stones乐队的伊恩·斯图尔特那样敲打钢琴。但在大多数情况下，White Stripes在乐器上是简约的，只有吉他和鼓。我记得上一次从摇滚的基本要素中挤出如此密集的声音是在Liz Phair的《Exile in Guyville》中。虽然这张唱片探索了很多粗糙的声音纹理; Jack White不像Liz Phair那样克制而尖刻的机智，他选择把一切都放在一边，一个聪明的头脑未经过滤的玩世不恭，发出1000赫兹的原始攻击声。

White Blood Cells surges with classic rock's grittier moments, stomping around like the MC5 and, on the instrumental "Aluminum," Sabbath. The guitar echoes the second half of Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps. But Jack's vocals are pure indie rock-- bratty and unashamedly so-- and in his upper register, his voice yowls and cracks with pissed adolescence.

White Stripes随着经典摇滚的坚韧不拔的时刻而激增，像MC5一样的速度快节拍重的歌曲，在器乐“Aluminum”上，如同Black Sabbath。吉他与Neil Young的《Rust Never Sleeps》的后半部分相呼应。但Jack的声音是纯粹的独立摇滚——顽皮和问心无愧的——在他的上层音域中，他的声音因青春期的愤怒而发出嘶吼的声音

Virtually all of these songs address a distanced lover. Sometimes he's coming home to see her; other times she's done him some permanent wrong. The lyrics are succinct and direct, and poetic like an aged bluesman. On "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground," he sings: "If you can hear a piano fall, you can hear me coming down the hall/ If I could just hear your pretty voice, I don't think I'd need to see at all." He concludes the song with, "Any man with a microphone can tell you what he loves the most/ And you know why you love at all if you're thinking of the Holy Ghost."

几乎所有这些歌曲都针对一个疏远的情人。有时他回家看她；有时她对他犯了一些永久性的错误。歌词简洁而直接，像一个年迈的蓝调歌手一样富有诗意。在“Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”中，他唱道：“如果你能听到钢琴坠落，你就能听到我从大厅里走下来/如果我能听到你漂亮的声音，我想我根本不需要看到。”他在这首歌的结尾说：“任何有麦克风的人都可以告诉你他最喜欢什么/如果你想到圣灵，你知道你为什么爱它。”

On the country hootenanny "Hotel Yorba," the Stripes reflect the grit of early Railroad Jerk-- a glee-filled boogie with Jack's voice breaking and whooping, almost on the verge of a yodel. "Fell in Love with a Girl" is frenzied and rollicking (the album's best), complete with Yardbirds-type "ahhaa's" and a joi de vivre tempered by the admission that trouble is sure to follow: "My left brain knows that all love is fleeting."

在乡村喜剧《Hotel Yorba》中，White Stripes反映了早期Railroad Jerk的勇气——欢快的布吉舞曲，杰克的声音断断续续，大喊大叫，几乎是在约德尔的边缘。《Fell in Love with a Girl》是疯狂和滑稽的（专辑中最好的），以Yardbirds式的“啊哈”结尾，以及承认麻烦肯定会随之而来的生活乐趣。：“我的左脑知道所有的爱都是转瞬即逝的。”

Indeed, many of the songs admit that the love is lost. On "The Union Forever," Jack White mourns, "It can't be love/ Because there is no love." The song is a riff on Citizen Kane, including a strange breakdown with sampled dialogue from the film. Here, the White Stripes are the most experimental they get, which is to say "not very," though the song reminds me of the ragged power of Royal Trux without the pointless artiness. Certainly, it would be nice to hear the White Stripes take this music in a new direction, but this band is all about the songs, and the songs are good enough to stand alone, sans-flashy effects and tape editing.

事实上，许多歌曲都承认失去了爱。在"The Union Forever,"中，杰克·怀特哀悼道，“这不可能是爱/因为没有爱。”这首歌是《公民凯恩》的即兴重复段，包括电影中对话样本的奇怪分解。在这里，White Stripes是他们得到的最具实验性的，那就是说“不是很”，尽管这首歌让我想起了Royal Trux精疲力竭的力量，没有毫无意义的艺术性。当然，很高兴听到White Stripes将这种音乐带向一个新的方向，但这个乐队都是关于歌曲的，这些歌曲足够好，可以独立，没有华丽的效果和录音编辑。

"The Same Boy You've Always Known" is another high point. For a ballad, it rocks harder than most bands' hard-rockers, yet it wrenches in its emotional impact. Jack White repeats certain key lines, straining his voice to impart meaning and feeling. Again, the state of the relationship in question is uncertain. The song ends uncommitted and terribly sad with, "If there's anything good about me/ I'm the only one who knows." How many bands have failed with entire albums of moroseness to only express the alienation of those two lines?

"The Same Boy You've Always Known"是另一个高潮。对于一首民谣来说，它比大多数乐队的硬摇滚乐更强烈，但它的情感影响却令人心碎。Jack White重复了某些关键台词，用他的声音来传递意义和感受。同样，这段关系的状态是不确定的。这首歌的结尾没有承诺，非常悲伤，“如果我有什么好东西/我是唯一知道的人。”有多少乐队用整张专辑的忧郁来表达这两句歌词的疏远而失败了?

The closest thing to a dud on this record is "We're Going to Be Friends," a gentle, nostalgic ditty of innocent love and childhood. It's a little too pleasant, lacking any of the fear and confusion of those pre-double-digit years, but its softness gives the record's midpoint some time to inhale before another six exhalations of fire.

这张唱片中最接近无用的东西是《We're Going to Be Friends》，这是一首温柔、怀旧的无辜爱情和童年的小曲。这有点太令人愉快了，没有了那些两位数前几年的恐惧和困惑，但它的柔软给了唱片的中间点一些时间来吸气，然后再呼出六次火焰。

Finally, at the close of the album, Jack sits alone at the piano for "This Protector." Though its message is vague, there are implications of religion and loss: "You thought you heard a sound/ There's no one else around/ 300 people out in West Virginia/ Have no idea of all these thoughts that lie within you/ But now... now... now, now, now, NOW!" Now what? It's the floating resonance of the moment, the intensity of the feeling, that gives these words meaning.

最后，在专辑结束时，杰克独自坐在钢琴前为“The Protector”演奏。虽然它的信息很模糊，但也有信仰以及损失的含义：“你以为你听到了声音/周围没有其他人/西弗吉尼亚州有300人/不知道你内心的所有这些想法/但是现在......现在......现在，现在，现在，现在！”现在怎么办？正是当下的浮动共鸣，感受到的冲击力，赋予了这些词语意义。

White Blood Cells doesn't veer far from the formula of past White Stripes records; all are tense, sparse and jagged. But it's here that they've finally come into their own, where Jack and Meg White finally seem not only comfortable with the path they've chosen, but practiced, precise and able to convey the deepest sentiment in a single bound. It's hard to know at this point in the game where they'll head from here, but what matters is right now. And right now, I want to listen to this album again.

White Blood Cells与过去White Stripes的唱片的套路相差不大；它们都是紧张、稀疏和锯齿状的。但正是在这里，他们终于进入了自己的领域，杰克和梅格·怀特似乎不仅对他们选择的道路感到满意，而且练习和精确能够在一个范围内传达最深刻的情感。在游戏中的这一点上，很难知道他们将从这里去哪里，但重要的是现在。现在，我想再听一遍这张专辑。