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Horehound, by The Dead Weather

m61363pa3g8Move over, James Brown. The hardest working man in show biz is Jack White. Since the White Stripes first burst into public consciousness with their third album, the brilliant White Blood Cells, guitarist and singer Jack White has been omnipresent. He has released three albums with the White Stripes, two albums with The Raconteurs, produced an album for Loretta Lynn, toured extensively, released a live Stripes DVD, jammed with the Stones, Pete Townshend, and Bob Dylan, finished working on the forthcoming guitar geek documentary It Might Get Loud, prepped a new White Stripes documentary due out this fall, opened a record store/record label/rehearsal space/recording studio in Nashville, got married and had a child, and has formed his third band, The Dead Weather. I get tired just thinking about it. The kicker is this: he’s been great at everything he’s done. Jack White is having a stretch of several years that most musicians only dream about: whatever he touches turns to gold. He simply can’t do anything wrong at this point. I’m sure that he will stumble at some point; everybody does. But right now, he’s got a really hot hand and he’s smart enough to take advantage of it.

Horehound is the first album by The Dead Weather, and White takes a back seat (literally) on this project. Unlike his other bands, White is not the focus of attention here. He’s not even the guitarist: for this project he returns to his first instrument, the drums. Surprise, surprise: yes, he’s even a very good drummer. He’s also not the lead singer. While White sings lead on one cut, the vocals are handled by the smoldering Alison Mosshart of The Kills, who sings in a voice amazingly similar to…Jack White’s. The bass duties are picked up by Jack Lawrence of The Greenhornes and The Raconteurs, and the guitar and keyboards are Dean Fertita of Queens Of The Stone Age.

Jack White has always come across as the decent, respectable boy of rock and roll. He’s finding it harder to be a gentleman, but he’s trying. He wants to be the boy to warm your mother’s heart. He wants to settle down and get married by a priest. He thinks that we are gonna be friends. He doesn’t drink or do drugs, apparently. He does have a dark side, of course. Jack’s greatest sin is his power of manipulation, evidenced on Stripes songs like “You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket.”

On Horehound, Jack White loses his innocence to a maneater named Mossheart. The sonic difference between The Dead Weather and his other bands is immediately apparent. The White Stripes sound like blues lovers on a Zeppelin binge. The Raconteurs are a country-inflected classic rock band. The Dead Weather? A cross between Nine Inch Nails, the Cure, and Lucifer.

The star of The Dead Weather is Alison Mossheart. She is the strutting, ravenous alpha-female. One can almost see the discarded bones of her previous lovers as she struts past. If you look in her eyes you’re turned to stone, as if she were a beautiful Gorgon. Rolling drums, plucked guitar strings, synthesized sounds start “60 Feet Tall,” as Mossheart croons “You’re so cruel and shameless/But I can’t leave you be…You’ve got the kind of loving/I need constantly.” She-Devil Mossheart has her eyes set on someone who isn’t good for her. It’s okay, though, because she can take the trouble. Mossheart is the flip of Jack White. If White is the nice guy with a naughty, manipulative streak, Mossheart is the girl who is attracted to the bad, but is herself bad enough to leave nothing but scorched earth in her wake. She feeds on the bad…and she’s got the manipulator Jack in her sights. Ferocious guitars and the raunchiest, filthiest bass I’ve ever heard slam in and out of the song while White plays Mitch Mitchell-style rolls.

Mossheart lets White know early that his manipulation won’t work on her. “You say that I love you/But it ain’t true…I’d like to grab you by the hair/And drag you to the Devil,” Mossheart spits on the brilliant “Hang You From The Heavens” as the thick, intense music swirls up and down around her. On his sole lead vocal, White protests that he may look like he can be easily defeated, but he’s really made of much tougher stuff. “I may look like a woman/But I cut like a buffalo,” he sings on “I Cut Like A Buffalo” as the instruments create a wall of frequently discordant noise behind him.

Jack’s claim of toughness isn’t having any sway on Mossheart. She counters Jack’s claim by informing him that he’s unable of manipulating her and helpless before her. She’s got him pinned, and he just wants to get up. “I said no,” Mossheart sings in a tired voice on “So Far From Your Weapon,” as if she’s already tiring of the game.

The peak of this extraordinary album is “Treat Me Like Your Mother,” which could act as a soundtrack for the Götterdämmerung. White’s manipulative ways are crushed by Mossheart. White and Mossheart trade vocals, but it’s Mossheart’s show. “Stand up like a man!/You better learn to shake hands/And treat me like your mother,” Mossheart scolds. White responds, as if it’s his brain trying to convince him what to do: “Play dumb/Play dead/Try to manipulate…” But he’s never met anyone quite like Mossheart, who spits his own words back at him, going so far as to spell out for him “M-A-N-I-P-You late!” It’s all too late, for Jack. He’s crossed over.

By the next song, “Rocking Horse” the nice boy is writing letters to God:

I drank some dirty water
Shook evil hands
I’ve done some bad things
And they get easier to do

Then I wrote a nasty letter
And I sent it to the Lord
I said don’t you dare come
And bother me no more

Mossheart joins him on the vocals, strengthening the theme, joining him at his evil hip.

A cover of Bob Dylan’s “New Pony” serves to reinforce the basic theme. While the lead vocals are all Mossheart, the lyrics reflect the same back and forth between the two principles. Over a brutal heavy metal industrial backing that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Ministry song, Mossheart first sings about owning a lame pony named Lucifer who needs shooting. In the second verse, she takes on White’s role, wondering what’s going on in the mind of Miss X. In the third verse she again is scolding White. His “nasty letter to the Lord” from “Rocking Horse” is going to be turned against him: “That god you been praying to/Is gonna give ya back what you’re wishin’ on someone else.” She ends the song with the blatantly sexual imagery of climbing up on the pony, who is bad and nasty, but she loves him anyway.

On “Bone House,” Mossheart lets Jack know that she’s the one who is in the position of power for now, for ever. An industrial blues song, with judicious synthesized guitar licks and clanging cymbals, “Bone House” finds Mossheart breaking the news to Jack that she always gets what she wants, and she does it by putting his heart in a vault. “I’ll build a house for your bones,” she informs him.

The instrumental “3 Birds” follows, and sounds like a soundtrack from some lost movie. Lawrence’s bass drives the song with keyboards, drums, and guitar noises providing color. It took me a while to like it, but I do. At around the 1:40 mark, when the synthesizer and the psychedelic Sergio Leone acoustic guitar come in and take over the song, I was sold.

On the penultimate track, “No Hassle Night” Mossheart once again provides the voice for both herself and Jack. The relationship, one of anger, manipulation, and, presumably, unbelievably great sex, is all but over. Both Mossheart and White are wasted, done. “I’m looking for a place to go/Where I can lay low/Die slow,” Mossheart sings. Her voice is tired, the musical accompaniment thick and slow. “I’ve become her and it hurts my mind.” At this point, the lovers are exhausted and all they want is a night without any problems.

“Will There Be Enough Water?” ends the album. The thick, industrial sound of the album is gone, with just a lightly strummed acoustic guitar, delicate piano, and light drums providing a bluesy backdrop as Mossheart and, predominantly, White meet their reckoning. “Will there be enough water/When my ship comes in?” they wonder. “When I set sail/Will there be enough wind?” One can’t help but think the answer is no. These lovers are doomed.

This final track is, unfortunately, the sole bum song on the disc. It’s not a bad three minute song. The problem is that it’s over six minutes long, and never really goes anywhere. But as for the rest of the album…simply brilliant. Grade: A

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The Listening Post: July 2009

Quickie reviews of what’s been rockin’ the Odd Pod this month…

  • The Pipe Dreams Of Instant Prince Whippet—Guided By Voices. Robert Pollard’s Guided By Voices was one of the more frustrating acts in popular music. At their best, they did hard-edged power pop that was absolutely sublime. At their worst, they did half-written songs lacking tune or melody. Like Ryan Adams on speed, Pollard was ridiculously prolific. Because Pollard lacked an editor to weed out some of the lesser songs, GBV albums tend to be hit or miss. Some, like Isolation Drills, are start-to-finish great. Composed of outtakes from Isolation Drills and Universal Truths and Cycles, the 23-minute, 10-song Pipe Dreams falls on the underwhelming side. Most of the songs are half-baked and feel decidedly incomplete. “Visit This Place,” “Dig Through My Window” and the title track are superior songs, and “For Liberty” is a a good piece of filler, but much of the rest just drags. There’s nothing really awful on this disc, but there’s nothing within a mile of Isolation‘s or Cycles‘s best moments, either. Grade: C+
  • 21st Century Breakdown—Green Day. Never before has a band gotten so much mileage out of the word “Hey!” There are currently two bands aiming to pick up The Who’s crown, now that The Who is The Two. The first of these is Pearl Jam, who carry the mantle of The Who’s stadium ready anthemic rock songs. The second, surprisingly, is Green Day, the punk rock trio from Berkeley, California. Green Day’s come a long way from the days of three minute pop punk songs about marijuana and masturbation. Now they’re writing honest-to-God rock operas like Tommy and Quadrophenia. The first of these, American Idiot, was a powerhouse collection of songs and performances. The latest, and what could be termed a sequel, or perhaps the flip side, of American Idiot, is 21st Century Breakdown. I’ve been listening, and I’ve read the lyrics. There’s a theme of alienation and disenchantment with the state of America today, and characters with actual names (Christian and Gloria), but I’m damned if I can figure out what the actual plot is (but then, I still don’t know the plot of American Idiot, either). As songs, most of them are really solid. The title track is a heavily charged anthem fueled with punk rage, while “Christian’s Inferno” crackles with demonic laughter and a ferocious performance. Perhaps strangest of all is “Peacemaker” which sounds like a Jewish folk song fueled by amphetamines, like an outtake from Fiddler On The Roof played by The Clash. There are some complaints: at over an hour, it’s a whole lot of Green Day; there’s a certain sameness to a lot of the songs; the first single “Know Your Enemy” goes nowhere, and the ballads “Last Night On Earth” and “Restless Heart Syndrome” only prove that Green Day’s strength is in short, sharp, and aggressive songs. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of that type of song on this album. Grade: B+
  • Flop & The Fall Of The Mopsqueezer—Flop. An unknown gem, the 1992 debut album from the Seattle band Flop is a strong collection of catchy power pop tunes played with a relentlessly hard guitar edge. From the opening guitar crunch of “I Told A Lie” to the joke album ender “B” (a simple count off followed by one crashing chord), the energy of the album remains high. There are punk rock ravers like “Zeus My Master,” hard-edged pop songs (the irresistible “Tomato Paste”) and one perfectly chosen cover song, the Kinks obscurity “Big Sky,” that is played in a heavy, amped-up style far removed from the Kinks’s far gentler version. The album lacks the brilliant vision of their Seattle peers Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains, but compares favorably to better-known Seattle bands like The Posies or The Young Fresh Fellows. Grade: B+
  • One Misssissippi—Brendan Benson. Another debut album, this one from the power pop songwriter currently adding light to Jack White’s shade in The Raconteurs. Benson’s solo albums are all pretty similar. That said they’re also all really good and One Mississippi is no exception. There’s a delightfully surreal aspect to much of Benson’s songwriting. The guy’s got a warped sense of humor. A title like “Sittin’ Pretty” evokes all sorts of images. The catch line of the chorus (“My baby’s tied to a chair/Don’t she look pretty/Just sittin’ there”) is not one of them. But when the lyric is matched to a great, catchy pop tune it’s almost impossible not to sing along. Similarly, who would believe that there would ever be a really great song written about insects taking over the world (“Insects Rule”)? There’s also “Got No Secrets,” a great parody of the “too much information” types who remain an annoying presence in the media (“When I was a young boy/I was beat up by my dad/I grew up fast/I took drugs/And now I’m in rehab”). From start to finish, the album contains one pop gem after another, despite a couple of songs that aren’t quite top quality (like the album opener “Tea” and closer “Cherries”). Like a combination of Paul McCartney, the Raspberries, and early Who, Benson writes smart, catchy songs that rock. Grade: B+
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The Rolling Stones: December’s Children (And Everybody’s)

decembersThis is the final album from what I will call the “early years” of the Stones. Released late in 1965, December’s Children isn’t really an album. Much like a few of Capitol Records’ Beatles “albums,” Children is a patchwork quilt of singles, live tracks, and songs from English EPs. It contains only one bona fide classic, and six of the twelve songs are cover songs.

Strangely, the first side of the record (I’m clearly kickin’ it old school here) contains five of the six covers, leaving side two as the real harbinger of what the Stones were really working on at the time.

As usual, the covers are excellent. “She Said Yeah” is played with a ferocity and aggression that would not be commonplace until the English punk movement arrived more than a decade later. The obligatory Chuck Berry cover, “Talkin’ About You” similarly has more grit than the original. The Stones always brought an innate aggression to their cover songs that frequently elevated their versions to levels above the originals. In comparison, the covers done by the Beatles were, with some exceptions ( e.g., “Money,” “Boys,” “Twist And Shout,” “You Really Got A Hold On Me”), usually close approximations of the original tunes, and paled in comparison to the brilliance of Lennon and McCartney’s originals. For the Stones, the covers frequently saved their early albums from being somewhat lightweight. (What the 1963 Stones did to Lennon and McCartney’s “I Wanna Be Your Man” is downright frightening, turning a fairly soppy song given to Ringo as a throwaway into a song of nakedly sexual urgency. It is akin to what Jimi Hendrix did to the utterly banal “Wild Thing” a few years later.)

Covers of Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On” and Muddy Waters’s “Look What You’ve Done” are a step down. “You Better Move On” is a very good soul song, but “Look What You’ve Done” sounds like an English band doing blues (and even though that’s exactly what they were, the Stones were always better than that). The vocal on “Look What You’ve Done” is excellent, and Jagger deserves much more credit than he is ever given as a blues singer. The harmonica, likely played by Brian Jones, is on overdrive. It drowns out all the other instruments and does little more than detract from Jagger’s compelling performance.

The sole original on side one, “The Singer Not The Song,” is a throwback to the earlier days of the Jagger/Richards songwriting combination. It’s a good song, but can’t be viewed as anything less than a letdown after “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” And the high note squealed in the fadeout is just brutal. The Stones had mastered blues and rock singing, but were light years behind the Beatles, Beach Boys, and Byrds when it came to singing high harmonies.

Side one ends with a live recording of “Route 66.” At least I think it’s live. It’s got that “studio recording with overdubbed screams” sound to it. Either way, it’s not much to write home about. Without the shrill screams, it’s not a bad performance. But it sounds muddy.

While side one may end with a whimper, side two kicks off with one of the greatest drums licks in rock history, followed by Keith’s unstoppable rhythm guitar and Bill Wyman’s McCartney-esque bass as Jagger sings one of rock’s greatest anthems, “Get Off Of My Cloud.” A hymn to the desire to be left alone, the lyric actually has some nice imagery (“I sit at home/Lookin’ out the window/Imagining the world outside” “The parking tickets/Were like a flag/Stuck on my windscreen”). “Cloud” is really nothing less than a continuation of the saga in “Satisfaction.” Jagger takes a shot at the world of television advertising (“In flies a guy all dressed up like a Union Jack/Says I’ll have five pounds/If I have his kind of detergent pack”), and seems to have decided that his best chance for satisfaction is in being left alone. It’s a thrilling song, even now after all these years and all these listens. Perhaps because it was not as famous as “Satisfaction,” “Get Off My Cloud” can still be heard with fresh ears.

“I’m Free” follows and this also seems to run with the theme. In pursuit of satisfaction, Jagger has chased all hangers-on from his cloud. The result is that he is now free to sing his song, any old time. Earlier he had complained “I can’t get no satisfaction;” now he “can get what I want.” Frankly, the song is a little repetitive, but the vocal is convincing and the music is great. The early song, “As Tears Go By” follows. They’d written this old geezer anthem and given it to the ingenue Marianne Faithfull to sing. From her teenage lips, or from the lips of the young Stones, the lyrics seem a bit precious, as if they were consciously trying to write a song that was “mature.” The string arrangement, undoubtedly done with one eye clearly looking…um, yesterday…is quite nice, and Jagger’s delivery is as good as usual, but the song overall is way too old for the young Stones. In fact, it’s old for the current Stones.

The remaining original songs, “Gotta Get Away” and “Blue Turns to Grey” are both good performances. “Gotta Get Away” is not a particularly compelling song. It feels rushed and underwritten, but the Stones carry it with the strength of their convictions. “Blue Turns To Grey” is the better song, but carries some of the same criticisms that can be applied to “As Tears Go By.” It seems self-consciously “mature” and one can’t help but wonder whether they were trying to catch up to the ever-escalating songwriting prowess of Lennon and McCartney by writing more “adult” songs.

Unfortunately, side two ends with yet another live, or perhaps “faux live” track, “I’m Moving On.” With this song, the album ends as it began—with a full blast of punk rock fury. The performance once again is just plain mean. The ever-present screams of thousands of young girls itching to satisfy Mick make it hard to listen to, though.

The next Stones single, released two months after December’s Children was the epochal “19th Nervous Breakdown.” The song would both cap the Unholy Trinity of Stones classics that began with “Satisfaction” and continued with “Get Off My Cloud” and set the stage for the middle period of the Stones, where the cover songs would all but disappear and Jagger and Richards would refine their songwriting until it began turning out one classic after another.

Grade: B