On the copybook of any other artist, it would have barely counted as a blot. But last year, when news emerged that the hitherto sure-footed Jack White had recorded a song for a Coca-Cola ad, it was reported by some as an act of indie heresy.

Fanning the flames, Noel Gallagher – the same Noel Gallagher who plagiarised the New Seekers’ Coke tune I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing for his own Shakermaker – declared: “Jack White ceases to be in the club.”

In this month’s Mojo, White said he felt that the episode formalised his departure from the parochial discourse of indie rock. Listening to Icky Thump – an album that wipes the floor with anything that has borne the Oasis imprint for more than a decade – you wonder why he couldn’t have left sooner.

Everything you need to know about White’s self-confidence is in the incongruous components that make up the album’s eponymous single and title track. Deploying a bastardised Lancashire phrase to rail at American neo-cons (“Why don’t you kick yourself out/ You’re an immigrant too”) is pretty cool – but the genius is the combination of Meg bashing a Yeti march, Zep-style riffage and the ancient oscillations of Joe Meek’s old keyboard.

On this form, White is an irresistible force. Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn is a case in point. In theory, any song whose creator pays tribute to his Scottish ancestry by singing about thistles over a bagpipe drone should be terrible. But the White Stripes negotiate this tricky terrain with warrior zeal, before the song mutates into an Incredible String Band-style freak-out entitled St Andrew.

Amid all this, there’s no escaping the influence that White’s work with the Raconteurs has brought to bear upon his “main” band. You couldn’t imagine most of last year’s Broken Boy Soldiers on a White Stripes album, but on that album White hit a vein of classicism that spreads across Icky Thump like a rash. Perhaps because it sounds like the Spiders From Mars playing Van Morrison’s And It Stoned Me, You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do What You’re Told) sounds like an instant standard.

The traffic of great ideas suggests that, for White, writer’s block is something that usually resolves itself by the end of the afternoon. He wrote the miasmic I’m Slowly Turning Into You after the director Michel Gondry told him about a metamorphosis-based concept he had for a White Stripes video. There’s little more to Effect and Cause than three chords and a lyric, but what a lyric: “Well, I ain't saying I’m innocent, in fact the reverse/ But if you’re headed to the grave, you don’t blame the hearse.”

Casting Jack and Meg as door-to-door collectors of bric-a-brac, Rag and Boneacts as a thematic missing link between the Yardbirds and Steptoe & Son. Amid all the narrative guises White dons throughout the album, there’s something especially persuasive about this one – the sharp-eyed opportunist, picking through rock and blues ephemera in the conviction that he can make something new and exciting with them. In his hands, nothing is rubbish. Not even bagpipes.

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