Under Great White Northern Lights CD/DVD Review
Having been a fan of Detroit’s own The White Stripes for the better part of a decade, you can image how stoked I was when I was able to finally get my hands on a live album. And then I found out it came with a DVD featuring footage from the same tour.
I was happier than a pig in mud.
As soon has I had the opportunity, I put the CD in to my fiancé’s car (she has a much, much better sound system than I do in my vehicle) and played the disc the only way there is to play The White Stripes: as loud as possible with the windows rolled all the way down.
It didn’t take long for me to rediscover everything I love about The White Stripes, who haven’t recorded anything new in almost three years. The music of Under Great White Northern Lights, which was recorded over the course of the band’s tour of Canada in 2007, is everything Jack and Meg have always provided and nothing more.
It’s raw.
It’s loud.
It’s dirty.
It’s makes you want to take a shower and smoke a cigarette.
After giving the disc a solid, straight-through listening, I did, however, start to pick up on everything that doesn’t make this live recording as fun to listen to as I hoped it would be. In the true style that is The White Stripes, this album is poorly recorded and a majority of Jack’s vocals are nearly impossible to understand.
And then I watched the DVD.
I’d like to be able to use my extensive vocabulary to properly review the DVD in detail, but the first thing that comes to mind is this: It’s fucking fantastic.
Directed by Emmett Malloy, who’s famous for working on just about every music video made ever, Under Great White Northern Lights has seamlessly blended together Jack and Meg’s country-wide tour of Canada, during which they played in every providence, whether it be in a major stage show, a nursery center, a bowling alley, from the back of a boat, on a public bus or one of a dozen other free, small-venue side shows, with short interviews that discuss the history of the band, its love for Canada and the importance of playing shows in small towns and cities.
The best party of the DVD is that the footage captured is just as raw and dirty as the music it features, but, because there is a visual side to everything, you understand why the music sounds the way it does: Jack and Meg just play dirty music, and that’s much easier to grasp when you see how much they get into it.
In the end, the CD portion of Under Great White Northern Lights is best enjoyed by true fans of The White Stripes, fans who appreciate Jack and Meg for who they are and don’t expect anything different from them. The DVD, however, is perhaps the best music DVD to ever be released; it offers an intimate look at The White Stripes you can’t get anywhere else and features some of the best live performances you’ll ever get out of a band.
CD Tower Rating: 3 out of 5 Towers
DVD Tower Rating: 5 out of 5 Towers
–
Stromski
Post Script: Enjoy this preview of the movie:
