The White Stripes Across Canada: Toronto

"Every man, woman and child, eight to 80, blind, crippled and crazy..."

Jack White has a gift for summing up a show, nay a tour, at this point. From the hipsters clad head to toe in black to the 11-year-old kid beside me, who was beside himself in awe, to the elephantine and hirsute shirtless guy who somehow managed to get dragged out of the place by three security guards during the underwhelming "In The Cold, Cold Night," Thursday night at the Molson Amphitheatre was not only a testament to the immense talent and seemingly universal draw of The White Stripes, but it gave one the sense that they're constantly moving forward without ever losing sight of how they got there.

After treating the YMCA at Yonge and Grosvener to one of their "secret" truncated shows Thursday afternoon, Jack and his ex-missus took on the decidedly more cavernous amphitheatre and made it feel like they'd invited 16,000 of their closest friends to the smallest, dirtiest, delta blues dive this side of the Ambassador Bridge.

Since they started their cross-Canada trek, the musical exploits of the one of the world's palest and most mesmerizing live acts have been well-documented in all the reviews on ChartAttack, and in all Canadian music journalism for that matter. Barring any kind of cataclysmic event, it'll continue to unfold in just the same way. The set list on Thursday night didn't seem to stray from any of their other shows to date, as it was liberally strewn with "classics," including the boisterous, slightly sped up version of "Hotel Yorba" and the demure but lovely "We Are Gonna Be Friends," while still giving the audience a taste of the new stuff, such as the cathartic "Icky Thump" and bluesy swoon of "Effect And Cause." The utterly captivating 95-minute set was jammed wall-to-bursting-wall with too many songs to count and the take-no-prisoner swagger of the Detroit duo. And shit, if they didn't play an absolutely searing version of my all-time favourite Stripes track, "Ball And Biscuit," which left my mouth totally agape.

Jack and Meg fed off of each other all night. The manic frontman strutted, jumped and jittered up to an array of mics strewn across the stage, some of which faced Meg's no-frills drum kit, while others pointed out at the audience, who clapped, sang and indulged in a staggering amount of stoned and drunken air-guitar wizardry. With every passing second the crowd just roared louder and louder, pushing the decibel level to something akin to standing next to a jet taking off at a nuclear testing facility during a hydrogen bomb test.

The White Stripes always manage to fill my headphones with a sound that defies their meager two-player makeup, and on this night I got to see them the way I've always thought I should. Their shadows, periodically cast against the blood-red backdrop, stretched seven metres high, and even then they seemed too small to be producing the melodic din that came crashing off the stage. Right now, whether they're standing two-and-a-half storeys above the rest of us or playing to a handful of kids at a YMCA, The White Stripes are just that much larger than life.