The Dead Weather: Horehound

It looks like this album might be the one moment in the year when all the Strange Glue staff opinions converge on a verdict, I’ve been registering a “yeah it’s alright” from most quarters. I’m sure they’ll put me right below if I’m out of line.

I was looking forward to hearing this record, I felt like an apple ready to go back to the orchard. Time to do some joining in with these broad cultural ripplings, time to play with the other kids. Someone called me an obscurist the other day, and it pissed me off, particularly when he said he’d never heard of the bands I invoked while explaining that I wasn’t.

I used to like the White Stripes and I still do to some degree, in the way I like Abba perhaps. There is an undeniable appeal. I also like The Kills. Being a country lad it was quite a thrill to listen to their most recent record on the tube the last time I was in London, like a suburban indie kid going to Mali to do some voluntary work and really getting into Fela Kuti or something… I know fuck all about the Greenhornes, but neither do most of you.

Sorry! I was assuming you’d all read at least one of the many pieces of “news” about “Jack White’s new band” which also includes Alison Mosshart of The Kills, Dean Fertita of Abba and Jack Lawrence of The Greenhornes. That’s a supergroup, like Audioslave. Coincidentally the song ‘Treat Me Like Your Mother” sounds totally Audioslave, but Mosshart’s voice isn’t powerful enough to cut the mustard, sitting like a poky Balsamic vinegar at the bottom of a poorly mixed dressing. That’s a hack analogy! I’m back in the game!

What next? There’s some good bits: Their version of Dylan’s ‘New Pony’ suits their style, it’s whipped up to a mono-dimensional bluster in a similar fashion to the way Stripes rendered ‘Lovesick’ from Time Out of Mind, back at Reading festival in 2002. Dead Weather could probably nail a version of ‘Senor’ if they put their minds to it, but I’m not going to spend a few paragraphs explaining how good they would be at doing covers of post-‘75 Dylan songs.

I’m reckoning that the songs I liked most at first will be the ones I end up liking least. ‘I Cut Like a Buffalo’ has an instant appeal, I love that fat, squelching, Toad of Toad Hall organ and the choking impressions for about thirty seconds. The bridge is pretty good too, but even at three and a half minutes it feels too long. A good idea stretched beyond it’s viscosity, there’s not enough paint for the porch so they water it down and hope the nod worthy beat confuses everyone into thinking it’s some kind of classic. Conversely the track that follows it, ‘So Far From Your Weapon’ slipped by me on the first few listens, but is now tugging me out to sea like a rip-current... well, a tide at least. Mosshart rears up from an almost earnest swoon, contorting her vocals into a convincing caricature, one that hints mirror-like at something buried in her imagination.

It beats the hell out of the lukewarm echolalia of tracks like ‘Hang You from the Heavens’ where it sounds like they ran her voice through the bluesinator. It almost goes completely awry elsewhere too, but little qualities save the vocal from becoming a wholesale annoyance. On ‘60 Feet Tall’ she injects a plaintive, eerie girlishness that sort of sidles up to the fence on the very outskirts of David Lynch territory but it isn’t enough to make the song anything more than the lead contender for the most confused of a floundering bunch.

Horehound is doing its thing slap back in the middle of garage-rock purgatory. It sounds like it wants to be two things at once, underground and populist, a limbo you couldn’t accuse the White Stripes, The Kills or Abba of inhabiting. To make sure I even like the music that Dead Weather lean lovingly toward (from the comfort of David Letterman’s balcony?), I put on a great mix-tape a friend made me. It consists of mostly obscure and unobtainable garage psych and proto punk by such luminaries and lunatics as Todd Tamanend Clark, Gyp Fox, Simply Saucer and the Orthotonics, as well as some slightly more youtubeable songs like the infectious snarl of ‘Shopping Bag’ by The Penetrators. I’d not heard of any of them, and I haven’t gone looking since, but it’s a damn good CD he’s made me, Cheers Simon!

The wilfully eccentric angles that dominate all of the songs are given free reign; becoming both a blessing and a curse. Each song is incredibly distinct, hoisting a gigantic flaw onto a pedestal and whip-thrashing it into an Undeniable Rock Song (if only I was talking about the Dead Weather CD and not the mixtape. That would have been really something...). This strangeness also consigns these disparate, freakish records to the rarest of loving touches: the sudden pause and the rapturous clutch of the fast-flicking fingers of obscurists and collectors. The kind of people I’m glad I have for friends, because I would never be bothered to read up on these records or to spend hours at carboot sales rooting through boxes of shite to find one good song.

Where was I? Oh yeah, two things at once. Maybe even three if you include them in that weird sub-category of pseudo-forgotten musics. The one that Tarantino created, inadvertently or not, by causing people to believe that Dick Dale was somehow “underappreciated” or a “lost legend” or somesuch nonsense. ‘Rocking Horse’ is the song I’m talking about, they breakout the Shadowsesque guitars and the Mexicali songbook, sing about writing “a nasty letter to the Lord, saying don’t you come and bother me no more”. They make it “weird” by overdriving their yearning wails into what some journalists might call an intense slab of punishing noise. But in the context of such a derivative mongrel of a song, it’s mock-abrasive at best.

The instrumental ‘3 Birds’ is pretty good, kind of snappy and imaginative in the way it explores itself. The closing sprawl of ‘Will There Be Enough Water’ is just atmospheric enough to turn smoulder into some tranquil, slow burning strangeness in my imagination. I can see why they decided to get together and write songs: something clearly clicks between them, but the click doesn’t know if it’s the sound of the needle landing on a private-press record or the tick-tock of the clock hanging from the sash of Miss Zeitgeist 2009.

It seems to me that Dead Weather often do their best when they’re not trying to impress, and fall flat on their faces when they try to emulate superhero soundtrack bonus songs as on ‘No Hassle Night’, what a stinker…. On much of the others they do a little of both. I’m getting mired in the detail here: I wouldn’t buy this record, I wouldn’t even consider it if I’d only heard its most enjoyable songs.