An admission from the offset: I hate the term ‘side project’. I find it dismissive and think that it lends any musical undertaking a gimmicky air. With this cleared up, we are free to discuss The Dead Weather’s debut album with the objectivity that it deserves. Co-starring in this venture with Jack White is Alison Mosshart of The Kills, with Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stone Age handling lead guitar duties and Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs providing a hard, grimy bass. White takes his rightful place behind the drum kit (it was he, after all, who taught Meg how to wield those sticks with such ferocity) while Mosshart snarls and wails her way through the entirety of Horehound like PJ Harvey if she morphed into some sexy biker chick who devours men by the dozen in a Dusk ‘Til Dawn-style roadhouse. Mosshart and her band, The Kills, have oft been accused of favouring style over substance but, in my estimation, this is bandwagon-jumping judgement at its finest. Not only does Mosshart surpass competence, but the passion with which she attacks each song on this album proves that she has ‘substance’ coursing through every blue vein in her stylish body. If substance is embodied by current indie-press darlings like Glasvegas and other such wet blanket acts, give me superficiality any day.
In fact the whole album, which was cut in just three weeks, is fraught with creative urgency. But rather than giving the album a messy or unpolished finish, this raw hurriedness serves as a vector for the primal bloodlust for the music that first enticed the quartet to recording those first few songs in the analogue studio at Jack White’s Third Man complex in Nashville, Tennessee. Jack doesn’t do modern, and the deliciously seedy retro-blues/garage-rock timbre that he resonates is slathered all over this album. Influences are varied and lucid and with the delta blues style, Son House-inspired Will There Be Enough Water to the reggae-rock tendency of Cut Like a Buffalo and the Rage Against The Machine/Beastie Boys-like undertones of current single, Treat Me Like Your Mother, Horehound proves that The Dead Weather are far, far more than just another ‘side-project’ for the multi-talented Jack White.
