The Dead Weather
Sea Of Cowards

It happens that you find yourself in one of your "cities" and step back into one of those record stores you've plundered for years. It happens you need a CD copy of "Marquee Moon" because the vinyl you have is an aggregator of affections, and you don't want it to go to ruin. It also happens that as soon as you walk in, there he is, the one with whom you shared many beers outside in the evening, and it takes you five hours to leave. Five hours that lasted little.

I will spare you the musical trip that swept through the store all afternoon; it is indeed irrelevant. But it would be interesting to present you the entire play(full-length)list, which concluded precisely with the tracks of the album I present below and that I didn’t let slip away because played at high volume, at home, it’s really, really cube-like.

You surely know more about The Dead Weather than I do. Mosshart, Fertita, Lawrance, and White return after just one year - more convincingly - disguised as good interpreters of what it might mean to make rock in 2010. The album impressed me favorably; I found it contemporary, avant-garde not so much in the genre proposed but in the ability to take the right trends and put them together with a bit more soul compared to "Horehound".

"Sea Of Cowards" convinced me because in just a few minutes (more than thirty) it reaches the goal of offering you a good magma made of crystallized defiance and dandyism, essentially resulting in a sly album: certainly, whatever one might say, popular (I think it has good sales potential) but it is never played stupidly or sordidly crafted at the drawing board. I indulge in a shaky comparison that might work: the pop rock sparkle frivolously proposed by Garbage in the second half of the '90s is reflected inverted in the shadowy decadence formulated by The Dead Weather at the close of the first double-zero decade. I hope I conveyed the idea. An idea detached from genres yet anchored to the exhibitionist attitude of a specific time period.

The album sounds like a successful yet smudged angioplasty. The sounds wander in a dense haze that reeks of trip tremors and stoner "ignorance". But they are only aftertastes for tobacco-glued palates. The overall atmosphere that unites all the tracks is decidedly noir, reeks of the new millennium's anger secretions but doesn't take to the streets. It’s as if it wants to remain a form of protest (nice the title) didactic, arrogantly self-referential, and grandiose. It seems closed to approach like a taxirdriver, and guided by the megaphonic voice of Mosshart, schizoid and a magnificent interpreter of controlled hysteria and seasickness-like ups and downs (soul sickness). At times ruthless towards waxed vocal cords. In two tracks, White also intervenes: I read that many were pleased with this, but I believe it would have been better to leave the microphones to Mosshart.

I also read that some have heard references to Sabbath and the dirigible in the music. Well, there’s no doubt those years are massively present in some tracks, but more than the two historic bands, I would simply speak of a hard blues on space routes. I marvel at how relics of archaeological scores sound so current thanks to an excellent group effort that isn’t entrenched but still fairly stably placed in that guascoindie niche that’s made the fortune of many (slips the ATM, White). Among beams blackened by humidity and old-style plasters in freefall, one notes synth presences on guitar machine-gun bursts that play the role of the executioner compared to the previous work. "The Difference Between Us", not coincidentally, turns out to be the best piece of this release according to the writer.

In the difficult and sophisticated change of every track, it’s not easy to define the postmodern vintage aura that envelops everything. I believe it’s an album that truly looks forward, playing dirty and retro. And I am also sure that it isn’t an exercise in style for a superband whose members hail from big-name backgrounds. This work thickens the artistic relationships among the four and brings them closer to being a united and credible group. Without stylistic evidences attributable to their original projects. The strong piece is missing, a further step forward in personality is needed. They have taken only half of it, but it's enough to hope well. And to return to see a friend, in one of "my cities".