The clock struck 12 as I dropped the needle on The Dead Weather’s Horehound. Traveling down the devil’s highway, I pulled out my cell. It said this call would be roaming because I was in area code (420).
I look over at the passenger seat and there she is, my honky tonk partner in crime. Egging me on in this international killing spree. I pause a second… There are going to have to be some rules. Same as last time, right? My subconscious trips into the past.
The Dead Weather is the latest project from Jack White. I finally understood him when I saw the PBS documentary on The Blues. He is a simple southern blues man. Son House, just sweatier and paler and much louder. From a swampy beginning, White has kept moving upstream, but still has some of that brackish water in his lungs.
The album starts with a couplet of bluesy rockers, 60 Feet Tall and Hang You from The Heavens. The greatest, but not solitary, difference from Jack White’s previous band is the female singer. From the sounds of it, the kind you don’t take home to mother. Like much of the album, the parts are tried and true post grunge indie components craftily and nefariously assembled. By the third track, the album degenerates into prog-garage Dub reggae with coal black blues humor. They treat it like a joke, but you don’t know when they’re jokin’. Touche. By the end we are outroing some instrumental space cadet twinkles run through a Marshall Stack. Throughout the effort dark turns, club beats and outdated band jams coexist and sometimes harmonize. Like Schrodinger’s cat, the interference pattern taps out an even beat on the shadows of the mind.
This album is clearly the work of the field and flower. The herb and and the bees. T.H.C. and S.E.X. Alison Mosshart, part of the exceptional band The Kills, was opening for Jack White’s The Raconteurs. Strained vocal chords meant Jack had to take it easy on the mic. To ease the burden, Alison would spell him, front and center. Jack liked the view.
Along with a Queen of the Stone Age, that grimy fleshy energy pumps. Raven black to blood red. Alison steps up to the mic, dead center with Jack directly behind on drums. White doesn’t keep his vocals on the sidelines, however. We find him doing Prima donna duties, maybe more than he should. Overall, there are very few mistakes in style or substance across the eleven tracks. By the end I was wishing at least for an even thirteen.
Show's over folks
A sense of the darker side of voodoo permeates the vibrations from beginning to end. If your cruising altitude is sufficiently high it smells of danger and tastes like leather. Duller senses would say Rush meets Blues Explosion or some other bingo style number letter combination. Either way, it strikes the target. Maybe not a bulls eye or a triple twenty, but at least a solid triple six. The Dead Weather have it figured out. Left, right. Left, right.
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