“We just keep going, right, Meg?” Jack White crows near the end of “Rag and Bone,” a snarling blues-rock stomp. “Old-folks house … catacombs … Lookin’ for techniques, turntables to gramophones … /They’re just things that you don’t want/I can use ’em/Meg can use ’em/We can do something with ’em/We’ll make something out of ’em.”

For a decade now, Jack White has been such a dedicated self-mythologizer — spinning tall tales about his childhood, applying mystique to his music and dress code with refusenik rhetoric and talk of European art movements — that it’s hard to believe anything he says about his band, especially when it’s delivered carnival-barker style in a jive drawl. But this jokey aside holds the key to the White Stripes’ project. Jack and Meg White are great scavengers, rummagers in the attic of popular song, making uncanny collages from castoffs and heirlooms: Appalachian folk-ballad fatalism, Delta crossroads guitar licks, Robert Plant’s libidinous yowl, yellowing Brill Building sheet music, the scuzz-caked 45s of a hundred forgotten garage-rock bands and more vintage tube amps than Lenny Kravitz could fit in his beach house.

And now, the bagpipes. This often-mocked instrument bedecks two songs on Icky Thump — first wheezing alongside acoustic guitar in “Prickly Thorn, but Sweetly Worn,” a traditionalist Scottish reel Jack matches with ye-olde-style lyrics (“And the thistle is a prickly flower/Aye, but how it is sweetly worn”). Then comes the sequel, “St. Andrew (This Battle Is in the Air),” which starts out like another slice of Highlands folk before exploding into a psychedelic mini-epic, with bagpipe skrills and screeching guitar jousting above Meg’s spoken vocal. It’s a typically cheeky and perverse stunt, adding another layer to the White Stripes myth of origins (the album’s press release alludes to the Stripes’ “Scottish ancestry”) and playfully excavating ancient music while also dabbling in a little misty-mountain Zeppelinalia.

Indeed, after laying low on the exotic, marimba-and-piano-spiced Get Behind Me Satan, Jack White, guitar hero, is back in full, outrageously indulgent glory. At times, Icky Thump feels like an essay on the capabilities of the electric guitar’s upper register: Listen to the pealing notes he plays toward the end of the blues vamp “300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues” or the almost painfully shrieky climactic solo in “You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do as You’re Told).” The result is the headbangingest White Stripes album yet, anchored by Meg’s usual messy bashing, with devilry erupting when least expected. The mariachi-flavored cover of Patti Page’s late-’50s hit “Conquest” builds to a magnificent call-and-response featuring trumpet and White’s most showily fleet-fingered ­soloing to date — high-­desert Joe Satriani.

If the blues progressions put Icky Thump in Jack’s musical sweet spot, Jack the spiritual traveler is, as ever, adrift — hounded by cruel fate, pondering death and desolation, chasing redemption and hot women, including some half his age. The teenage love object in the blues-funk corker “A Martyr for My Love for You” may be the ultimate in his pantheon of spectral sirens, an unattainable goddess who plunges him into a meditation on mortality and statutory-rape laws. But Jack also turns his gaze from earthly matters, trying on the fiery rhetoric of a Pentecostal preacher: “If you’re testing God/Lying to His face/You’re gonna catch hell.”

It’s the sound of a band not stretching out so much as digging in: burrowing deeper into loamy soil they know well. And why not? Nostalgia may be all that’s left for rockers in 2007 — it’s Timbaland’s world, after all. And where thousands of lesser bands offer warmed-over versions of old glories, Jack and Meg, like Bob Dylan, are trickster traditionalists. They profess to worship roots music but treat it as a plaything, a mystery to be plumbed and parodied, the source of sustenance and fodder for an elaborate conceptual-art stunt that makes the past sound like the future. “We wanna get it, Granny/While it’s hot/You think it’s trash, Granny/But it’s not,” Jack sings. There are plenty of old-folks homes and catacombs left to explore, and rags and bones to be collected. They’ll make something out of ’em.

Download: “Icky Thump,” “Conquest”