This week’s Truth in Advertising award goes to Best Buy, who is offering a fabulous, exclusive new DVD/CD set of Under Great White Northern Lights, the new White Stripes documentary and live soundtrack, for just $14.99.
The documentary follows the duo on their summer 2007 tour of the hinterlands of Canada, in cold, grey places where top-shelf rock bands rarely venture. It mixes mixes onstage footage with black & white backstage and offstage material that has led many to compare it to the original rock-doc, Bob Dylan’s Dont Look Back, which went behind the scenes of his 1965 solo tour of the UK.
I haven’t watched the film yet, and have only sampled the CD, but it's more than enough to give Northern Lights a thumbs-up review. The White Stripes are incapable of being boring, and the show samples nicely from their entire oevere. For all Jack’s busman holidays with the Raconteurs, Dead Weather, soundtrack work, Coca-Cola commericals and supposedly a recent collaboration with Jay-Z, the White Stripes are clearly home base.
Listening to them do an Appalachian style ballad like "LIttle Ghost" on the CD soundtrack, Jack & Meg remind me of one of those weird groups one encounters on the classic collection The Anthology of American Folk Music. A weird little brother sister or husband wife duo that writes and performs songs of faith and mystery. But thanks to the modern miracles of technology and distribution they are not an obscure regional act but a world famous one. The clip below from the film, set to their twee classic "We're Going to Be Friends" gives a sense of an epic shared history, but also hints that this could be the end of the road for the group. Supposedly there are several scenes in the film that allude to Meg's overall sadness and anxiety, which caused part of their last tour to be cancelled.
End of the road or not, with Under Great White Northern Lights, the Stripes deliver a big sound and a mighty value for the dollar, and for that we should be eternally grateful.
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