Looking back from a distance of a few years, the retro rock movement that emerged in 2001 with bands like the Strokes, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and the White Stripes looks a lot like another historically minded moment: the urban folk revival of the early 1960s. Both were slavishly imitative. And, like the urban folkies, sustainable success for retro rock’s stars depended on their ability to evolve beyond their influences. Few could, and by their second or third albums, they too were history.

The most notable exception is the White Stripes. Jack White, with his chameleonic talent, turned out to be retro rock’s Bob Dylan: The one who initially best embodied the movement’s narrow tenets – Dylan began his career as almost a Woody Guthrie impersonator, and White was heavily indebted to garage and early blues – and then took it to a place of originality no one else could.

In the liner notes to the White Stripes’s brawny, rawk-ish 2003 album “Elephant,” the band assured listeners that “no computers were used during the writing, recording, mixing or mastering of this record.” Since its release, it appeared Jack was headed into a “John Wesley Harding” phase, retreating further from the present. He produced and collaborated on a highly regarded album by country legend Loretta Lynn, and recorded unoriginal (but that was the point) versions of American folk songs for the “Cold Mountain” soundtrack.

But instead of a headlong dive into the deep end of the Lomax Archive (the band sampled the folk-song hunter on their second album, “De Stijl”), we get “Get Behind Me Satan,” the most adventurous and least historical White Stripes album yet.

It’s the White Stripes’s answer to Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” – similarly shot through with unexpected sonic elements, and equally bent on subverting the band’s own sound. “The Nurse,” with its delicate marimba and discordant piano rolls, is so uncharacteristic of the White Stripes that you might mistake it for a mashup. “Red Rain” is a death-metal blues played with twee bells and woozy guitar. “If there is a lie / Then there is a liar too / If there is a sin / Then there is a sinner too,” sings Jack, sounding like Satan himself thanks to wax-drip echo effects.

Which is not to say the White Stripes have turned their back on the past. Far from it. But they manage to mix new colors from history’s palette, and apply them with radical technique. “Little Ghost” finds Jack and Meg sounding like a Depression-era country band and singing about a spectral lover. “Instinct Blues” is a more primal counterpart to Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love),” though there’s nothing show tune-y about it. In place of the searing guitar solos and slide runs we’ve come to expect, Jack pops notes like he’s playing the teeth of an electrified comb, then ends with a Stoogesworthy riot of sludgy guitar. “Well the crickets get it / And the ants get it / I bet you the pigs get it / Even the plants get it / Come on now and get with it / I want you to get with it,” Jack demands. Though he never defines his pronoun, it’s pretty clear “it” isn’t falling in love.

When it comes to songwriting, White is no Dylan, but he does have a knack for hard facts and rough poetry. The themes here are the same he’s pursued all along – lust, truth, guilt, but above all, romance with the past. There are two songs about 1940s film star Rita Hayworth. On “Take, Take, Take” he skewers an insatiable fan who quickly goes from flattering to creepy (requiring a signature, a photo, a kiss, a piece of hair).Then, on “White Moon,” he begins to sound like such a fan: “Oh Rita, oh Rita / If you lived in Mesita / I’d move you with the beat of a drum / And this picture is proof / That although you’re aloof / You had the shiniest tooth ‘neath the sun.”

“Passive Manipulation,” the obligatory Meg-singing-badly song, is mercifully only 35 seconds long. But with its hints of incest, it serves as a preamble to the album’s final song, “I’m Lonely, But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet,” which takes up the subject more directly. Of course, with Jack and Meg (a divorced couple who masquerade as brother and sister), the line between sibling and lover has always been fuzzy. “I love my sister / Lord knows how I’ve missed her,” sings Jack, sounding genuinely tempted. “Sometimes I get jealous of all her little pets / And I get lonely, but I ain’t that lonely yet.” In the end, he restrains himself, knowing that in love, like music, there’s romance in the past, but no going back.

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One of the White Stripes’s strengths is that they’ve never cared – or seemed to anyway – if they succeed. On their new album “X&Y,” Coldplay has the opposite problem: They’re afraid to fail.

Coldplay’s lovely, uneven 2002 album, “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” catapulted them to U2 and Radiohead-like heights of international stardom. “X&Y” is the sound of the band furiously flapping its wings, trying not to come down. The album was delayed once for reworking, and the band has talked about how hard they labored over every aspect of it. It sounds that way – labored, that is.

Unless you pay really close attention – and it’s a struggle to pay close attention – you couldn’t tell if you’d listened to the entire album or a single track a dozen times. Gone are the piano ballads and rich dynamics that defined their best songs. Chris Martin sings everything in the same polished falsetto; the guitars all have the same clean character and seem to play the same notes; there’s crystalline organ throughout.

The thick production is supposed to be engrossing, no doubt, but it’s so dense and featureless that the reverse happens: You can’t find your way in at all.