The Dead Weather

What do you get from a supergroup mix-up of the White Stripes, Kills, Raconteurs and Queens of the Stoneage? The Dead Weather. Not a dead sound mind you. Check out their new single, Hang You From the Heavens, which you can listen to in the player below:

I missed a surprise show by the band last night at the legendary Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, but fortunately I will be able to catch them at Koolhaus on 22 July 2009. J.D. Consodine published a blog review in the Globe and Mail today:

If there were a few doubters among those who crowded into the Horseshoe Saturday night for a surprise gig by the Dead Weather, it wasn’t just because the band’s debut isn’t due until the middle of next month.

No, the underlying trepidation likely had more to do with the “supergroup” hype surrounding the band. Combining White Stripes guitarist Jack White and singer Alison Mosshart of the Kills with Queens of the Stoneage guitarist Dean Fertita, and Raconteurs bassist Jack Lawrence may sound good in theory, but the fact that White would be on drums and Fertita mostly on organ turned that promise into a giant question mark. Would this band be the Queen of the Killer Stripes, or would it be a shambles?

They were definitely killer.

The Dead Weather specialize in distortion-soaked acid blues, an approach that has elements in common with the members’ other groups but which sounds totally fresh here. Indeed, from the itchy, slow-grinding groove of the opener, 60 Feet Tall , to the soulful drive they lent Bob Dylan’s New Pony , the four didn’t just revive blues rock, but gave it a startling new vitality.

Like most bands in that genre, the Dead Weather build their tunes out of three components: Heavy riffs, bluesy vocals, and a thudding beat. There was nothing particularly radical about the riffage, as even when Fertita delivers the goods on organ instead of guitar, there’s enough fat, crunchy fuzz to make it feel as rock solid as Gibraltar.

On the vocal front, White did a fine job of folding his influences into a unified sound, and was as wonderfully plaintive on the Them oldie You Just Can’t Win as he was urgently ironic on the driving, dub-inflected I Cut Like a Buffalo .

Mosshart, meanwhile, conveyed the lusty swagger of English blues rockers from Robert Plant to David Coverdale while completely avoiding the vocal excess endemic to that school. Whether revelling in the ballistic double-entendres of So Far from Your Weapon or pulling her hair to illustrate a lyric from Hang You from the Heavens , she rode the band’s sonic maelstrom with the aplomb of an Olympic equestrian, unruffled and utterly in control.

Still, what ultimately put the “super” into this group was the chemistry between the two Jacks. Lawrence and White played together with the sort of connectedness that almost suggests telepathy. It wasn’t just that the bass and drums often felt like a single instrument; what really made the combination special was the way they slipped a hint of soulful swing into the band’s steamroller grooves. At times, they were merely infectious, but at their best, they made moving to the music almost an involuntary action.

It took a little more than an hour for the band to work through 13 songs – most of its coming album, Horehound , as well as two unrecorded tunes – and despite the punishing volume and abundant feedback, it was hard not to wish for more. This is the sort of band that makes believers out of its audiences.