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64. Sea of Cowards - The Dead Weather (2010)

Rock

Jack White certainly can never be accused of sitting still for too long. The second of his post-White Stripes projects, The Dead Weather is a legitimate 21st-century rock supergroup comprised of White, along with Alison Mosshart of The Kills, Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stone Age and Jack Lawrence, White’s bandmate in The Raconteurs. The group has achieved more longevity than most other “supergroups”, having three studio albums under their belt. In the wake of the perhaps unsurprising success of their first endeavor, Horehound, their second, Sea of Cowards established them as a blues rock juggernaut while flexing a grunginess and electronic prowess. 

Aside from opening track “Blue Blood Blues”, which could be mistaken for a Jack White solo product, White relinquishes his guitar and vocals for much of the album, leaving the lion’s share of the fretwork to Fertita, the mic to Mosshart and opting for the drums and production himself. The result is a refreshing sound, gritty and somewhat intoxicating in its unpolishedness. Mosshart’s criminally underappreciated vocals command attention and dance with a promiscuous swagger above an unabashedly energetic din of shrieking guitars, sly bass lines and rattling drums. It’s difficult to pin down a single track that encapsulates the spirit of the album as it seems to evolve with each song, never sitting still or getting comfortable. From his place behind the drums and the sound boards, White’s fingerprints are all over the place. Every bit as good and as essential as anything else in his impressive catalog, Sea of Cowards is every single thing rock music is supposed to be.

*image; cover art for the album Sea of Cowards by the artist The Dead Weather