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*** White Stripes

WHITE BLOOD CELLS

(Sympathy for the Record Industry)

A couple of sensational blues-punk albums and a tour opening for Sleater-Kinney have made this Detroit brother-sister guitar-drums duo the happening indie-rock band of the moment. Singer/guitarist Jack White’s latest batch of electric tunes once again nds root in the Delta ramblings of Son House and Blind Willie McTell, but his pop instincts loom larger than ever. His voice takes two distinct shades — a low-rent Robert Plant and a dirtier Paul McCartney — and he’s got the bombastic riffs and the mellotron-sweetened melodies to back up both.

Damn good thing, too, because White Blood Cellsýis all over the map. The volcanic opener, “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground,” nds him bustling about old hedgerows and revisiting a vast ache of loss borrowed directly from House’s “Death Letter Blues: “I didn’t feel so bad till the sun went down/ThenýI came home/No one to wrap my arms around.” The tone set, Jack and sister Meg never pull the same trick twice: there’s a raucous Kinks-ish hootenanny (“Hotel Yorba”), big-production piano-and-organ pomp (“I’m Finding It Hard To Be a Gentleman”), nerve-fraying three-chord punk (“Fell in Love with a Girl”), extended spoken-word dirges, spaghetti-western country tunes, Melvins-style feedback orgies, and a few sterling McCartneyisms. It’s arena rock for bedrooms, but as Jack sings on “Little Room,” when “You’re working in your little room, and you’re working on something good . . . you’re gonna need a bigger room.”

— Carly Carioli