White Stripes, Under Great White Northern Lights

Jack White's mystique has taken a few knocks in recent years. When you've formed not one but two muso side projects, married a model, recorded a jingle for Coke and appeared in a documentary gassing about fretboards with Jimmy Page and The Edge, it's hard to maintain your status as a refusenik weirdo. But he still sounds most potent when he's on a leash, seething and snarling like a guard dog tethered to the post of Meg White's primitivist drumming. With no indication as to when he next plans to don the choke chain, this extravagantly packaged live album and film marks the end of at least the first chapter in the White Stripes' history. With typical conceptual neatness, the movie captures a 2007 concert in Nova Scotia on the 10th anniversary of the duo's first ever public performance.

This album isn't a document of that concert, but a collection of highlights from their Canadian tour threaded together so effectively that it might as well be. Uniquely for a band of their standing, the White Stripes haven't expanded their sound to fit their audience. Other groups add keyboardists or secondary guitarists to their touring line-ups; the White Stripes hire a bagpiper to open proceedings with a Highlands skirl. All the remaining space is filled with Jack White's berserk charisma. He is a shameless, eye-popping ham, whether devouring the scenery on the Citizen Kane-inspired "The Union Forever," or tearing through "Ball and Biscuit" with such libidinous frenzy that he might as well be playing guitar with his penis.

True to White's famous digitalphobia, the acoustics are thrillingly unpolished, and few live albums are as generous to the audience. We hear the Canadians punctuate a staggering "I'm Slowly Turning Into You" with lusty "hey"s, join in the a cappella breakdown of a half-speed "Fell in Love With a Girl" and take up a verse of "I Just Don't Know What to Do Myself" like a terrace full of soccer fans. Not usually one for "Howyadoin, Nova Scotia?" crowd-pandering, White nonetheless works the throng with cries of "Sing with me!"

The setlist, ranging from 1998's "Let's Shake Hands" to 2007's four-minute nervous breakdown, "Icky Thump," is neatly balanced between the obvious and the obscure. It crashes to a close after an hour with a predictably magnificent "Seven Nation Army," a flurry of techno-like guitar effects and a bagpipe coda. Short of actually giving you tinnitus and spilling beer over you, it could hardly be a more visceral document of a band who sold millions without sacrificing an ounce of their ragged garage-rock vigor. The Raconteurs and the Dead Weather are adequate diversions but really, Jack White can't get back to his day job soon enough.