Review by Josh Felty
Rating: Listen!
Perhaps more than any other modern musician/songwriter/producer combinations, Jack White of The White Stripes is all over the place. The Raconteurs, of course The White Stripes, and now The Dead Weather, a supergroup with an intriguing palette of sounds and influences smothered in garage band distortion.
And that classic, 60's vinyl sound White is known for adopting in much of his other projects.
What's different here is there's an inherent, multi-layered sound that not only manages to be thicker, but simpler sounding in many ways. The female vocals of Alison Mosshart (The Kills) lift the music to entirely new levels, especially in the call-and-response romper "So Far From Your Weapon" and the duet of "Rocking Horse". Horehound is a combination of sounds: as though The Velvet Underground met up with Jefferson Airplane and their rock 'n roll lovechild rolled in the hay with a Southern rock outfit in the late 70's. There's that grungy blues sound, a common thread in White's music, but there's also hints of surf music and rockabilly strewn throughout, with amazing results.
"Treat Me Like Your Mother" is a truly exciting, hard-hitting rocker. Definitely a signature Jack White concoction. "Bone House" starts out with a hypnotic wah-wah phase guitar over an ancient drum machine track that turns into a catchy little ditty reminiscent of psychedelica. It's safe to say every track on this one are equally treats to the ears as they are the soul. Each song hums with a dirty, dark hollow resonance that is made all the more beautiful with stellar, simple axe-trickery and hooky songwriting.
Interestingly, there's an instrumental medley "3 Birds" which showcases The Dead Weather's aesthetic. If anything, I recommend listening to it right after the opener. It's an audio-visual treat; you supply the visual, of course, within the recesses of your own imagination.
The remarkable thing about each one of White's side-projects is not only the new directions each one takes the audience music-wise, but where it takes his own eclectic, sometimes distortion-tinged/other times stringband-influenced sound. It's very similar to how musicians of not-too-long ago would leave their own familiar territory, experiment with certain aspects of touring and recording, then come back to that original lineup with something fresh and new.
White is just such a troubadour, constantly evolving and wielding the passion behind the music to his advantage. It's hard to pin down exactly where he fits in amidst the whole spectrum of popular music: his sound just is, and combined with those of Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stone Age, Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs, and Alison Mosshart, it is even more.
In all honesty, this is the sort of album I would actually love to buy on vinyl and listen to on the back porch, feet propped up with an ice cold drink in hand.