Two and a half minutes into "Icky Thump", something happens which is so perfect, you almost suspect the White Stripes' press officer magically orchestrated it. We are sat in the boardroom at XL, listening to "Icky Thump" being played to us at generous volume. The title track comes first, and it sounds terrific. The Stripes have reminded me of Led Zeppelin plenty of times before, but I don't think they've ever sounded quite this big. "Physical Graffiti" comes to mind, but there's also this weird North African riff being played on a synth, and an organ solo which is pure Jon Lord. Meg White is hitting the drums with immense weight, while Jack continues to deconstruct rock structures as he goes along - stuttering when you expect him to charge, messing with the levels. The thing is, it eventually occurs to us that the levels are being messed with a bit more than White had planned. In fact, "Icky Thump" is so powerful, it appears to have blown XL's fancy stereo. We take the CD out, and the speakers are still crackling. A few minutes later, we start again in another office, and first impressions prove correct. "Icky Thump" is yet another great White Stripes album, and one which amps them up in a new and grandiose way. If "Get Behind Me Satan" was predicated on piano, marimba and White's experiments with pop, "Icky Thump" is all about electric guitar and giant drums. In one way, it's a return to the elemental first recordings of the band: songs like "Bone Broke" and "Little Cream Soda" recall "Cannon" and "Astro", if memory serves, punctuated with those shrieking, high-frequency solos. The sound, though, is much heavier and fuller, at the same time. Again, I keep writing Led Zeppelin in my notes, even when the sound becomes folkier - as on the astonishing "300mph Torrential Outpour Blues", where the meticulous layered guitars are strikingly close to a full band sound. During "Rag And Bone" (ostensibly Steptoe & Son re-enacted by Jack and Meg), I start suspecting my critical line may be a bit narrow, when the riff reminds me of Them's "Baby Please Don't Go" - played, of course, by Jimmy Page. On one listen, "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)" sounds like the hit: a sort of Beatles/Southern Rock hybrid that would have fitted nicely onto the soundtrack of, sigh, Dazed And Confused. The next step on from "Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground", perhaps. The strangest two tracks are "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn" and "St Andrew (This Battle Is In The Air)". The former begins like, yes I know, "Gallows Pole" before the bagpipes turn up and the Scottish imagery gets denser and wilder. Eventually, it shifts into "St Andrew", a heated expansion of the musical and lyrical themes with a spoken word vocal by Meg. Describing it all makes it sound like whimsy - and their ongoing obsession with perceived British eccentricities can be seen in the cover shot of the pair in full Pearly Queen regalia, too. But these songs are intense rather than throwaway. The prevailing atmosphere of "Icky Thump" means that even the playfulness is delivered in a forceful frenzy. Mexico figures, too. One of the redheaded women who stalk these songs is a "redhead senorita" (in "Icky Thump" itself), while "Conquest" (a Corky Robbins song popularised by Patty Page, apparently) is basically metal mariachi, with Jack going to head to head with trumpeter Regulo Aldama. I haven't had much time to pull the lyrics apart yet, but there doesn't seem to quite as much playing with the brother/sister/family business. The notable exception is "I'm Slowly Turning Into You", inspired by a Michel Gondry video treatment that has Jack gradually morphing into Meg. It's a full-blooded love song (about Karen Elson, we could crudely assume?), but the complexity of the concept - and of Meg sharing the muttered chorus with Jack - means that their relationship remains the object of much sport from this most devious and compelling of bands. "Little Cream Soda" seems to be about the loss of innocence - another recurring theme, but one which gathers bigger apocalyptic resonances with every album. The weakest track on that solitary listen seemed to be "Catch Hell Blues", a slide guitar workout that's technically brilliant but not immediately memorable. Really, though, I'm pretty sure they've done it again - given classic rock one more vicious and inventive twist. When I get to hear it another time, I'll let you know.

Back to work after the long Easter weekend, and we're being lulled into action by the debut album from Original Silence. Original Silence are ostensibly The Good, The Bad & The Queen for men of a certain age who went to All Tomorrow's Parties and never came back. Their ranks include Mats Gustafsson - a great, spluttery, avant saxophonist from The Thing - one of The Ex, Jim O'Rourke (who claimed he'd quit music a while back, with Sinatra-esque implausibility) and, perhaps inevitably, Thurston Moore. "The First Original Silence" is not quite as obliteratingly noisy as you might imagine, though it's still pretty wild. It's a bit like half a dozen men in a record shop having an intense argument about "Funhouse", and chiefly about how better that record would have been if Steve Mackay had stood at the front rather than Iggy Pop. Or, as Phil in the office just put it, it sounds like someone strangling Sooty. The best thing about Original Silence, though, like so many Thurston Moore projects, is the rampant and infectious sense of joy that making a racket can bring. It's a spirit that flows through so many releases on his Ecstatic Peace imprint, which currently seems to be hoovering up great tracts of the American underground. He's just signed up Sunburned Hand Of The Man for an album, "Z", which is pretty good free jamming, but which never quite finds the lumbering funk of their best albums (track down "Jaybird" if you can). Moore's also put out an album by an avant-garde bagpipe player called David Watson which I haven't got my head round yet, and a brilliant new Wooden Wand album which I'll write more about in a few days. I made some notes about Ecstatic Peace here in one of my very first blog entries. And without turning this into one of those awful self-referential blogs that constantly doubles back on itself, there are a couple of things I've been playing a lot since I first wrote about them. The Lavender Diamond album due next month on Rough Trade is, I think, a little classic of folk-pop (blogged about here). My wife refers to it as "folk Abba", which I think is spot-on. And since I wrote this, the whole Lightning Dust album has turned up, and is great, too; if you've heard the Black Mountain album and wanted Amber Webber to make "Heart Of Snow" last for 35 minutes, this one's for you.

Hot and slow in the Uncut office this afternoon, so I've put on the new album by Earth, which precisely fits the mood. Dylan Carlson's Earth, you may remember, were the Kurt Cobain affiliates who occupied the most extreme wing of grunge. Their records through the early and mid '90s largely sounded like Black Sabbath slowed down to an excruciating trudge. Gonzoid heavy, but kind of avant-garde, too. Carlson is an unlikely revolutionary. But Earth's influence on leftfield metal has been profound these past few years, all the more unlikely since their records felt so extreme as to be an evolutionary dead end. I guess Sunn 0))) are their most obvious disciples, so it's fitting that Greg Anderson from that band turns up on the new Earth album, "Hibernaculum". In the past few years, Earth's music hasn't got much faster, but it has mellowed, after a fashion. "Hibernaculum" largely consists of new versions of old songs, reinvented in the style of their last excellent album, "Hex; Or Printing In The Infernal Method". Today, we're going to call that style Spaghetti Doom, a sort of desert rock distinguished by great reverberant twangs, like Dick Dale at 16rpm. It's similar, too, to those bands out of LA like Savage Republic and their successors Scenic, and the widescreen, Morricone end of post-rock, Godspeed!You Black Emperor. Heady stuff, as you might imagine, at once meditative and menacing. I remember reading about how Queens Of The Stone Age (whose new one I should hear in the next week or so) used to have generator parties in the desert when they were kids: this, I think, would be the perfect music for the end of those parties, for watching the stars in a stupor. Or, of course, for getting through sticky afternoons in London offices. . .

The hilarious news that Keith Richards snorted his father’s ashes reminds me, obliquely, of an incident involving John Cale, at the University Of East Anglia, where he was playing the first date of a UK tour with a band that included Chris Spedding on guitar and uber-producer Chris Thomas on keyboards. This would have been in May 1975, just after the release of Slow Dazzle. We were in a lecture theatre at the university, which had been appropriated as the band’s dressing room. Cale’s parents have travelled up from Garnant in South Wales for the show, this being apparently the first time they’ve had the chance to see their son on stage and Cale has taken them for a quick drink. The band’s been hanging around since the afternoon’s sound check and as showtime looms, someone starts cutting up lines of coke, which are quickly gone. Everybody fairly high, there’s now some concern that Cale when he gets back from the pub will want a quick pick-me-up – John’s idea in those days of a so-called ‘quick drink’ being about eight pints. Whoever’s holding the coke starts chopping out a line for Cale, who we hear from one of the road crew is heading our way, bumping into things as he approaches. “Hold on,” says Spedding, eyes glinting somewhat mischievously. “Let’s see how he gets on with this.” Chris then starts crunching up a piece of chalk he’s found, which once crushed he draws into a rather impressive tramline. “Just leave it and see what he does,” Spedding says, just as Cale comes booming through the doors of the lecture theatre, like someone barging through a crowd trying to get to the bar for last orders, a slight air of distracted panic about him. He’s barely in the room when he zooms in on the line of chalk, which without hesitation, he snorts, head rearing back then, like someone’s just caught him under the chin with a fast-moving uppercut. I am fully expecting a cardiac incident of some kind to follow, or perhaps some cerebral episode that will leave him frothing at the mouth and turning a worrying colour. “Not bad,” he decides. “Could have done with a bit more edge, though,” he adds, before getting on with the business of preparing himself for the gig. Spedding and Thomas exchange amazed looks. Cale, meanwhile, seems utterly unaffected by a snootful of chalk dust – although I might add that for whatever reason, he starts his set by banging away at a piano as if he’s taken a sudden and untrammelled dislike to it that borders on violent hysteria. He is then shortly to be found screaming the lyrics to “Fear Is A Man’s Best Friend” beneath said piano, where he's crouched like some dark creature in the shuddering throes of a psychic breakdown. From where I’m standing, I can see Cale’s parents sitting at the side of the stage, his father, an eyebrow raised, giving his wife a quizzical look perhaps inspired by complete bafflement at this spectacle and wondering what happened to their son’s classical training and how he might have ended up here, under a piano, yelping like something demented that for the benefit of everyone might have to be shackled or put down. In closing today’s post, I wonder if you have a moment whether you could go to: http://www.demographix.co.uk/surveys/V6RF-XHDX/G7TZXXTT/ It's a questionaire - but there is a chance to win a prize!