Plumbiferous Media

The Dead Weather is Jack White’s lat­est super­group, with Ali­son Mosshart, Dean Fer­tita, and Jack Lawrence mak­ing up the other three quar­ters of the band. The style this time around seems to stray even far­ther from The White Stripes than White’s group from last year, The Racon­teurs, did, adding a hefty amount of exper­i­men­ta­tion to a sound already filled with influ­ences from a large num­ber of gen­res. The dif­fer­ence between the two groups that is most notable, how­ever, is that White has cho­sen pri­mar­ily to be the drum­mer of The Dead Weather, giv­ing his unique voice a break. But while divert­ing the drum line away from the hands of Meg White cer­tainly aided The Racon­teurs, this newest change did not ben­e­fit The Dead Weather, leav­ing its album, Hore­hound far less com­pelling than, say, Con­sol­ers of the Lonely.

On Hore­hound, The Dead Weather has the dis­tinct advan­tage of being able to com­bine the voices of two expe­ri­enced singers. This pre­vents Hore­hound from being just another album from either White’s White Stripes or Mossheart’s Kills. How­ever, it doesn’t quite take advan­tage of the syn­ergy of the two voices which, with their com­ple­men­tary attrib­utes, could have been quite well com­bined to cre­ate an inter­est­ing (and reward­ing) mix. Instead, they’re fit together with less care; they don’t ever quite work per­fectly and even occa­sion­ally clash. Addi­tion­ally, the moments when both vocal­ists are in sync, as they do on “So Far From Your Weapon,” are often cov­ered over by the music itself - in that case by overused syn­thetic effects.

Hore­hound is filled with the sort of exper­i­men­ta­tion that should add a level of cre­ativ­ity to the album, from the rhyth­mic energy of “I Cut Like a Buf­falo” to the rather inven­tive cover of “New Pony.” But very lit­tle of the exper­i­men­ta­tion actu­ally makes for enjoy­able music. The energy of “Buf­falo” doesn’t quite work to sup­port a cohe­sive track, and “New Pony” is over-inventive, most notably with the vocals (which seem stretched for the sake of exper­i­men­ta­tion), to the point where it doesn’t come close to doing jus­tice to the original.

Lyri­cally, Hore­hound is not strong or weak – it is sim­ply for­get­table. Though The Dead Weather is obvi­ously try­ing to cre­ate mem­o­rable, odd lyrics, for which White and Moss­heart have been known in their respec­tive projects, it doesn’t quite suc­ceed. Instead, it turns out unin­ter­est­ing (and uno­rig­i­nal) lines like “You’re so cold and dan­ger­ous / I can’t leave you be.” Fre­quent rep­e­ti­tion cer­tainly doesn’t help this - though a few of the best lines from the album, like the slightly per­plex­ing “You know I look like a woman / But I cut like a buf­falo,” man­age to be repeated with­out becom­ing com­pletely banal.

Where The Dead Weather most often tri­umphs is in the instru­men­tals. The drums on Hore­hound imme­di­ately make their pres­ence known with the rather heavy line on “60 Feet Tall;” how­ever, The Dead Weather suc­ceeded in rein­ing in the drums for the fol­low­ing track, “Hang You from the Heav­ens,” in which the drum­mer quite stun­ningly man­ages to take over the melody dur­ing a fill around the 35 sec­ond mark. More impres­sively, dur­ing “New Pony,” the drums sup­port the entire track for a good por­tion of the third minute, fol­low­ing the gui­tar solo. The other instru­ments also have their highs and lows on Hore­hound. While “I Cut Like a Buf­falo” retains a sig­nif­i­cant, ill-fitting reg­gae influ­ence, the gui­tar line on “Rock­ing Horse,” though incred­i­bly repet­i­tive, never becomes tir­ing, and acts as a major point of inter­est for the track. Towards the end of the album, on “No Has­sle Night,” a stan­dard Jack White gui­tar line is paired with a high line that seems entirely unchar­ac­ter­is­tic of White’s style yet fits with the rest of the track quite well.

Though the col­lab­o­ra­tion of Alli­son Moss­heart and Jack White in The Dead Weather was cer­tainly an excit­ing pos­si­bil­ity, Hore­hound wasn’t as suc­cess­ful as it could have been. The truly inven­tive and inter­est­ing parts of Hore­hound are often drowned out by those less so, and the failed exper­i­ments are much more promi­nent than the suc­cess­ful. It’s true that Hore­hound isn’t entirely unsuc­cess­ful - tracks like “Hang You from the Heav­ens” indi­cate that The Dead Weather can use all of the resources avail­able to them to cre­ate a gen­uinely engag­ing track - but, for the major­ity of Hore­hound, they’ve instead cho­sen to blindly experiment.

This post is tagged 40-49, The Dead Weather