The Dead Weather - "Horehound"

When I first saw the video for "Treat Me Like Your Mother," I thought to myself: Perhaps this will be a good album. The song itself was not that strong--kind of a whiney and lurchy combination that screamed of short and thoughtless production--but the tension created by Jack White and Allison Mosshart pumping their leather-clad selves full of bullets with fully automatic assault rifles and not dying gave me some hope that whatever else lurked on Horehound might be worth listening to. I don't know exactly why, but there's something about a good tense video that leaves you searching for a way to end that tension, and the usual route is by immersing yourself in the remnants of the album. But instead of resolution, I got a bunch of garbage.

The Dead Weather tote themselves as a "Supergroup," using well-established monikers like The White Stripes, Queens of the Stone Age, and The Kills to woo you into thinking that the sum of those parts would equal something awesome. But, it doesn't. Instead, what you get is about 45 minutes of some of the shittiest rock music conceived since I started liking music (which was about 20 years ago). I'm not even going to get into how awful this is, other than that White's and Mosshart's vocals are at most times indistinguishable--which is creepy since they are of the opposite sex--and that White's "drumming" is so putrid and sloppy that you would think that he recorded his parts while having some sort of temporary stroke.

But what pisses me off most is the back of the album, which shows a group photo of the "Supergroup" in which White has his head cocked to the side with his mouth hanging dementedly open as if to say "look at me, I'm being artsy and bad-ass at the same time and I know you're pissed about buying this album but I don't care because I'm an artist and haven't done anything half-way decent since Elephant and am pretty much the Dan Marino of rock and roll but I'm still rich and now have $10 more." That face staring at me is worse than the disc itself.