The Dead Weather
Horehound
(Sony Music)
Side projects can be a risky proposition for an established artist. Either they end up as a half-arsed mess and sully your rep, or they take on a life of their own and threaten to overshadow your “real” band. But The Dead Weather – featuring the talents of the hyperactive Jack White, this time on drums, and The Kills’ really quite astonishingly stunning Alison Mosshart, along with White’s regular collaborator Jack Lawrence on bass and Queens of the Stone Age dude Dean Fertita on guitar – manage to tread their way through this minefield very nicely, thank you.
In the case of this particular side project, the loose, unrehearsed nature of the whole thing is the key to its appeal. Given White’s love of getting things done quickly, the album was recorded in three weeks, and the result reflects the dynamism of its creation – not so polished as to lose the energy generated by the spirit of collaboration, but not so ramshackle as to be a disaster either.
Of course, it helps that Mosshart’s involved – her vocals are as arresting as ever, whether she’s channeling PJ Harvey on ‘60 Feet Tall’ or slinking up to the microphone with malicious intent on ‘So Far From Your Weapon’. White, originally a drummer, proves he’s lost none of his chops on the traps – his style crosses the raw Detroit primitivism of his White Stripes counterpart Meg White with some slick fills. The unsung star of the show, though, is Fertita, who proves a versatile and consistently impressive performer, one minute Xeroxing White’s blues riffs and the next minute summoning distortion that’s straight outta the desert (sessions).
The writing credits reflect the diversity of the record – a couple of the stand-out tracks are Fertita/Mosshart compositions, while White contributes the strutting ‘I Cut Like A Buffalo’ on his own and also collaborates with all of his bandmates in various permutations. There are also a couple of whole-band compositions that sound like the product of particularly fruitful jam sessions, and a cracking cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Pony’ for good measure. As a whole, The Dead Weather equates to the sum of parts, if not more – and given the quality of those parts, that’s no mean feat.
Tom Hawking