The Dead Weather - Horehound
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
The Dead Weather is Jack White (The White Stripes, The Raconteurs), Alison “VV” Mosshart (The Kills), Dean Fertita (Queens of the Stone Age) and Jack Lawrence (The Raconteurs, The Greenhornes), which pretty much makes them a supergroup. Supergroups rank all across the spectrum, from wtf? (Tinted Windows) to not-so-great (Audioslave, Velvet Revolver, Zwan) to not-too-bad (Street Sweeper Social Club, The Last Shadow Puppets) to pretty damn good (A Perfect Circle, The Raconteurs) and you never really know what they’re going to sound like until it’s too late. The real question is: can you still call it a supergroup when it’s a side-project? …or in Jack White’s case, a side-project of a supergroup/side-project? (Noticing this trend, the Onion recently featured an article about Jack White’s latest side project, Lakota Brick.)
So…what do they sound like? Well…Alison Mosshart sounds like she graduated at the top of her class in the Jack White School of Vocal Inflection, but that’s a minor quibble in the grand scheme of this group. As far as the album goes, none of the songs are bad, but none of them are phenomenal either. The tracks on Horehound that only have one writer are the weakest, including the cover of Bob Dylan’s “New Pony,” though it is better than the original. Mosshart’s “So Far from Your Weapon” and White’s “I Cut Like a Buffalo” are merely ordinary as well. Everything else is better than average – and the potential for a great song is right there underneath the surface – but, unfortunately, there is nothing to rival past White hits like “Steady, As She Goes” or “Seven Nation Army.”
- Score
- 86%
All of Jack White’s musical projects are worth hearing and, so far, The Dead Weather are producing the most consistently good music. This might not be a good thing since the output of the previous musical entities implies that the great songs might only be possible with corresponding bad ones. On a positive note, the second album from The Raconteurs was a marked improvement over the first and a similar improvement from The Dead Weather wouldn’t be surprising at all. This is definitely a band to watch. One last thing: the video for “Will There Be Enough Water?” is a fascinating look behind-the-scenes while they make a vinyl record…and it seems way more involved than you might expect.
