EDMONTON - There's a vast canyon dividing classiness and elitism; another separating polished esthetics and pompous trappings. Thanks to their specific and ever-adhered-to art-school, fascist colour scheme, it'd be easy to guess the White Stripes just might be snobs. A pair, perhaps, simply too untouchably cool to please an everyman crowd like the one sardined into the Shaw Saturday night. Well ...

Then you hear Jack White's voice go utterly raw on Icky Thump, a gritty freakout if not entirely new in the history of rock and roll, at least standing in defiance of the abysmally sulky state of mainstream radio rock in this look-at-me decade, the Nothings.

GREAT SINGERS

White, simply put, can sing better than pretty much everyone else and their Vocoders. When this idea is stacked onto the fact he's managed to make even the most razed and strip-mined blues formulas sound like they're his invention and only 20 minutes old, it's almost unfair to everyone else.

As his work with Loretta Lynn and his ongoing and demonstrably pleasant relationship with his ex-wife Meg prove he's a total gentleman transplanted somehow into the body of one of the most important living musicians.

So while it's true that, say, NoMeansNo technically outrocks the White Stripes, that White is quite often just standing still and strumming instead of leaping around, no one is actually complaining.

I love this band, as I have since first contact when I completely accidentally stumbled ignorant upon them playing a sparsely attended record-store performance in San Francisco most of a decade ago. Like then, White was in red, conversational, calm and serious when the music didn't require him to hit the notes Robert Plant first kicked apart anthills with. He is smartly dressed to look evil with a heart of gold, as the kids at the local drop-in centre free concert will all tell you.

And then there's Meg, with that small little head making concentration faces behind the peppermint/button drums. Not once was the crowd happier than when she came up front and sang In the Cold, Cold Night, immediately and cleverly followed by Jack covering her Passive Manipulation, which goes, "Women, listen to your mothers - don't just succumb to the wishes of your fathers. Take a step back, take a look at one another, you need to know the difference between a father and a mother."

Exposed under just a single dancehall disco ball with oddly domestic lyrics like these milking forever that strange dead romance which even Saturday still had Jack addressing Meg as "my sister," the reason this duo is so popular is that every step they take is daring and brazen.

They leap mountaintops in the fog and it always pays off. Why else would such a sweet little song like I Can Tell That We Are Gonna Be Friends touch so many hard hearts in the age of casual porno? There's just so much unspoken interaction in their faces - it's magic.

MAGIC INTERACTION

"This is working out, isn't it Meg?" Jack smiled Saturday night, as if he just realized this after a decade.

Little Ghost, Dead Leaves in the Dirty Ground for an opener, the set was about average for them, OK. Vancouver's in 2002 a little better. But whatever. They rocked, the sound was great, security was even chill and friendly.

At the end, joking about their red and white colours being, nationally, ours - the two suddenly paraded around a huge Alberta flag. It completely wrecked their palette, but somehow in their delicate hands, such a hoser move came off as totally sincere. Like they were asking us if they could be part of our seven-nation army.

Such a nice couple, really. It's almost a shame they chose to become internationally gleaming rock stars.