Warner Bros/Reprise

Released: July 14th, 2009

When looked at in its separate pieces, The Dead Weather should make for an awesome band: Jack Lawrence doing solid bass, Allison Mosshart yowling away on vocals, QOTSA’S Dean Fertita on keys and guitar and Jack White conjuring all the bluesy weirdness he’s known for behind a drum kit. It’s a shame, then, that all these decidedly cool pieces never really mesh into an enjoyable or particularly interesting album experience.

As the shambling, muted “60 Feet Tall” comes to a close, sounding like a hollowed out inverted blues torch song, it is immediately clear what the tracks’ (and the entirety of the albums’) major flaw is: Allison Mosshart’s rather limpid and ineffective vocals. I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of The Kills, but what I have listened to of the group does well to support and highlight Mosshart’s limited range to maximum effect, something which Horehound sadly is not capable of doing. Rather than imbue these songs with some fire or suitably creepy tone, Mosshart mewls along, rendering tracks that are already a bit too familiar of White’s other projects pretty much DOA. “So Far From Your Weapon,” with its sparse arrangement and wide space could have been a perfect venue with which to showcase some vocal flair or ability, but it instead limps to its repetitive and bland finish.

“An album that, by sheer force of its parts, could have been something great but instead reaches a middling and forgettable climax.”

Horehound is surprising in that it very much supplants initial notions of what it may sound like. Given the pedigree of the artists involved it is interesting to note the lack of out-and-out fist pumping, adrenalized rock tracks. This wouldn’t have been a noticeable omission if more had been brought to the table that expanded upon White’s blues/rock/weirdo signature but songs like “Cut Like a Buffalo” fail to do much of anything beyond a poor White Stripes pastiche.

There are some bright spots, however. “Treat Me Like Your Mother” sounds and feels like the product this collaboration was capable of; sassy vocal interplay fired back and forth between Mosshart and White as the rest of the band gets into a thick stomping groove augmented with some blasting organs from Fertita. It sounds totally awesome, brimming with venom and vague, accusatory lyrics about White not being able to look into his vocal opponents eyes’, on account that she’s “just like his mother.” It’s truly a great song but leaves a bittersweet impression, as the rest of the album fails to evoke the unsettled, aggressive creepiness of this track. A Bob Dylan cover, a few bluesy throwaways and an instrumental are all that remain of an album that, by sheer force of its parts, could have been something great but instead reaches a middling and forgettable climax. Hopefully for their next release The Dead Weather can conjure together some more bite and substance as Horehound is an album desperately in need of some.