Elephant (album)

Elephant
Studio album by The White Stripes
Released	April 1, 2003 (2003-04-01)
Recorded	November 2001 and April 2002 at Toe-Rag Studios and BBC Maida Vale Studio, London, England
Genre	Alternative rock, garage rock, blues rock,[1] punk blues, post-punk revival
Length	49:56
Label	V2 (US) XL (Europe)
Producer	Jack White
The White Stripes chronology
White Blood Cells (2001) Elephant (2003) Get Behind Me Satan (2005)
Singles from Elephant
"Seven Nation Army" Released: March 7, 2003 (2003-03-07) "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" Released: September 2003 (2003-09) "The Hardest Button to Button" Released: December 3, 2003 (2003-12-03) "There's No Home for You Here" Released: March 15, 2004 (2004-03-15)

Elephant is the fourth album by the American alternative rock band The White Stripes. Released on April 1, 2003 on V2 Records, the album marks the band's major label debut. Despite this change, Heather Phares of Allmusic believed the album "sounds even more pissed-off, paranoid, and stunning than its predecessor...Darker and more difficult than White Blood Cells."^[1] The record garnered extensive critical acclaim and commercial success upon its release,^[2] garnering a nomination for Album of the Year and a win for Best Alternative Music Album at the 46th Grammy Awards in 2004, peaking at 6 in the US Billboard charts and topping the UK album charts. In later years the album has often been cited as the White Stripes' best work and one of the best albums of 2000s; Rolling Stone magazine ranked it 390th on its list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" and later, the fifth-best of the decade. Third Man Records released a limited edition red, black and white vinyl reissue of "Elephant" on April 20, 2013, in celebration of the album's 10-year anniversary, as a Record Store Day exclusive.^[3]

Background and production

Album

Elephant was recorded in two weeks during April 2002 in London's Toe Rag Studios except for the song "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself", which was recorded at BBC Maida Vale studio. The song "Well It's True That We Love One Another" was recorded in November 2001 at Toe Rag studio. Jack White produced the album with antiquated equipment, including an eight-track tape machine and pre-1960s recording gear.^[4] As stated in the liner notes, White deliberately refrained from using computers during Elephant's writing, recording, or production.

The special edition 2013 Record Store Day reissue was pressed at United Record Pressing in Nashville, TN.^[5]

Themes

The album is a loose concept album, dealing with the "death of the sweetheart" in American culture. Like other White Stripes records, the cover art and liner notes are exclusively in red, white, and black, and there is a song with "little" in the title.

Cover art

The album has been released with at least six different versions of the front cover—different covers for the CD and LP editions in the US, the UK and elsewhere.^[6] To give an example, on the US CD edition Meg White is sitting on the left of a circus travel trunk and Jack is sitting on the right holding a cricket bat over the ground, while on the UK CD edition the cricket bat touches the ground and the image is mirrored so that their positions on the amplifier are reversed. The UK vinyl album cover is the same as the US CD but differs in that the color hues are much darker. The cryptic symbolism of the album art includes a skull sitting on the floor in the background, as well as peanuts and peanut shells in the foreground, and on the circus travel trunk appears the mark "III," Jack White's signature. Jack White is also displaying a mano cornuta and looking at a light bulb intensely, while Meg White is barefoot and appears to be crying, with a rope tied around her ankle and leading out of frame. Both have small white ribbons tied to their fingers. On the reverse side of the U.S. edition, all of the number "3"s are in red (disregarding the authorization notes at the bottom).

The US vinyl release has Meg wearing a black dress instead of the usual white dress that appears on all covers. It also has red and white colored vinyl.

In an interview with Q Magazine in 2007, Jack White said, "If you study the picture carefully, Meg and I are elephant ears in a head-on elephant. But it's a side view of an elephant, too, with the tusks leading off either side." He went on to say, "I wanted people to be staring at this album cover and then maybe two years later, having stared at it for the 500th time, to say, 'Hey, it's an elephant!'"

Reception

Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	92/100[7]
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[1]
Entertainment Weekly	B [8]
The Guardian	[9]
Mojo	[10]
NME	9/10[10]
Pitchfork Media	6.9/10[11]
Q	[10]
Spin	[12]
Rolling Stone	[13]
Uncut	[10]

The White Stripes were gaining momentum with their previous three albums and were generally lauded in critical circles. Upon its release, critical response to this album was overwhelmingly positive, and many critics hailed it as one of the defining events of the 2000s garage rock revival.^[4] Uncut magazine remarked that "Elephant is where the tabloid phenomenon of summer 2001 prove they are no flash in the pan by making a truly phenomenal record."^[14] David Fricke (with Rolling Stone) called it "a work of pulverizing perfection," adding, "It will be one of the best things you hear all year"^[13] and Allmusic said the album "overflows with quality".^[1] Critics also commented on the development of the band. NME noted that "The eloquence, barbarism, tenderness and sweat-drenched vitality of Elephant make it the most fully-realised White Stripes album yet."^[10] PopMatters said the album cemented "their evolution from Blind Willie McTell cover band with a pop sensibility to full-fledged, honest-to-goodness rock 'n' roll gods."^[15] The album enjoys a Metacritic rating of 92.^[16] Negative critique, though rare, was centered around the "gimmicks" that surround the music, most notably, the White Stripes' insistence on being called siblings. "So maybe it's time to drop the enigmatic charade," Lorraine Ali (with Newsweek) pleaded, although she concluded, "Elephant still sounds great."^[17] Robert Christgau gave the album a three-star honorable mention () upon release,^[18] but later claimed that he had initially underrated it, and gave it a new grade of A minus.^[19]

The album debuted at number one in the United Kingdom and reached number six on the Billboard 200 in the US. The album won Grammys for Best Alternative Album and Best Rock Song ("Seven Nation Army"). In 2003, the album was ranked number 390 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It was also placed thirty-ninth in Channel 4's list of the 100 Greatest Albums of all time.^[20] In December 2003, NME made it their Album of the Year. Recently, Rolling Stone called Elephant the 5th best album of the decade, and Seven Nation Army the 6th best song of the decade.

Track listing

Personnel

Chart history and certification

Chart procession and succession

References

External links

• Elephant at Discogs
• Elephant at Metacritic