The Dead Weather’s Sea of Cowards (2010) – MAYBE SO
By Chris Moore:
Sea of Cowards (2010) by the Dead Weather
(May 11, 2010)
Review:
Tighter and yet even more frenetic than their debut, Sea of Cowards is a fast-paced, distortion-drenched hard rock romp through eleven solid tracks, made all the better for the sharing of vocal duties between Alison Mosshart and Jack White: this album is the realization — and only a year later! — of what I had been hoping for when I referred to the great potential expressed in Horehound (2009).
Top Two Tracks:
“Gasoline” & “Blue Blood Blues”
Editor’s note: this post was originally published before December 2015; the exact original date is uncertain.
For Bob Dylan / Dead Weather chords & lyrics, CLICK HERE!
By Chris Moore:
Hello and welcome to yet another delay for the “double header” I promised last week or (technically) two weeks ago. But I have a good reason for holding off! Tonight, I’ve recorded “New Pony,” one of my least favorite Bob Dylan songs, because a brand new cover version was released on last week’s Dead Weather debut album.
First, I’ll give a little background on the original version of the song. “New Pony” was first released on Bob Dylan’s 1978 album Street Legal. To give you a little context here, Dylan had recently released Blood on the Tracks and Desire, arguably two of his best albums. The year 1975 found him fully engaged in the Rolling Thunder Revue along with such artists as Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, poet Allen Ginsberg, and others. Although he temporarily revived a different incarnation of the Revue in 1976, this phase of Dylan’s musical career was pretty much over by 1977.
This is not to say that life wasn’t busy for him. This was right around the time that his marriage to Sara Dylan was breaking down and the divorce proceedings began. A lot — perhaps too much — has been written about these personal aspects.
Street Legal was the product of a few weeks of sessions involving a select group of musicians that Dylan had recently worked with. Although his past two albums had met with critical success and his subsequent album, 1979’s Slow Train Coming, would earn him his first Grammy award, Street Legal has generally been lost in the valley between these two peaks.
Personally, I have always liked this album. Sure, the female background singers come across as a bit cheesy at times (have you heard “Baby, Stop Crying”?) and the instrumentation can be a bit much at times, but there are some great songs. “Changing of the Guards” is one of my favorite album openers and boasts a rare fade-in. “Is Your Love in Vain?” and “True Love Tends to Forget” are fantastic Dylan deep cuts. And “Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)” is a narrative wrapped in the best, darkest mood you’ve ever felt. (Jerry Garcia recorded a great version of the latter.)
As for “New Pony”? Well, it generally ranks as one of my least favorite Dylan recordings of all time, and certainly on this record. In fact, it’s the very rare track that I may occasionally skip when listening to the album. Why it was placed in the number 2 slot, I’ll never know.
That being said, let’s flash forward to 2009. Last week, the Dead Weather released their debut album, Horehound. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this group, this is a side project band composed of the White Stripes’ Jack White (drums, some vocals, acoustic guitar on one track), the Kills’ Alison Mosshart (lead vocals), Queens of the Stone Age’s Dead Fertita (guitar, etc.), and Jack Lawrence (bass, etc.). I really liked last year’s Raconteurs album (Jack White and Jack Lawrence’s other side project band), so I figured I would give this one a shot as well.
Long review short, I was not as impressed as I had hoped to be. (My one-sentence review is coming shortly!) That being said, the album certainly has its moments, and for me, one of the best moments is track seven when they cover Dylan’s “New Pony.”
This is an excellent example of a band you wouldn’t necessarily think of as being heavily influenced by Bob Dylan turning around and pulling off a stand-up interpretation of one of his songs. After hearing it, I thought that this song fit better on this album than it did on Street Legal. In that sense, I was happy to assign “New Pony” to a better place in my estimation of Dylan’s catalog of songs.
So, without further ado, I submit to you my acoustic rendition of the song as a send-up to the 1978 Dylan version and a tip of the hat to the brand-new 2009 version by the Dead Weather. I found that I was psyched to learn this ridiculously easy (at least chord-wise) song. Anyone who visits the Laptop Sessions on any regular basis knows that I’m no stranger to a Bob Dylan cover song, but I never thought I’d be recording this one.
Well, at least not until I ran out of all the other ones in 2045 or so…
I hope you enjoy this! (I’ve got so much to say about other music and non-music related topics, but I think this is quite enough for one post!)
The “Him” half of nostalgia-rock act She & Him is the more veteran act of the two, and it shows on his most recent release. A Wasteland Companion is unassuming at most times, but tends to manage that fine balance between simple and boring, leaning ever more towards “chill.” The Zooey Deschanel – the “She” in She & Him – duet “Sweetheart” doesn’t leap out as much as you might expect it to, but I suppose what can you expect from a one-off non-She & Him album track? As per usual, a little reverb goes a long way to making M. Ward’s vocals pop in all the right ways for his instrumental sound. At times, he draws outside the box, as in the distortion on his electric guitar in the standout “I Get Ideas.” Across the album, the acoustic guitar sparkles and the lyrics propel the sounds, working them into a cohesive yet artistic whole. Most tracks fly by, many at under three minutes, but this helps to keep up the pace of the album. When Ward drops the at-times-distracting ambient sounds and focuses on his songs for the words and music as directly as possible, the result is fantastic; and, thankfully, there are enough of those moments represented across this album.
What Kind of World (Brendan Benson)
Producer: Brendan Benson
Released: April 21, 2012
Rating: 2 / 5 stars
Top Two Tracks: “Bad for Me” & “The Light of Day”
It’s not so much that What Kind of World is bad so much as it is underwhelming. Early on, the album suffers from songwriting that can’t sustain the length of the tracks (and the songs aren’t that long). Later, as the tracks are shorter, they are not as well-constructed as it has already been established a Brendan Benson song can be. Most of the time, the songs seem more interested in being recorded versions of what must have been fun to play in the studio and would even be fun to play out live, but the overall constructions don’t stand up. To be certain, there are moments of transcendence, but these are lost in the slow drag that is the larger trend of the album. Those interested in more of the brilliance hinted at here should revisit 2009’s My Old, Familiar Friend, one of the great works of that year.
Blunderbuss (Jack White)
Producer: Jack White
Released: April 23, 2012
Rating: 4 / 5 stars
Top Two Tracks: “Freedom at 21” & “Love Interruption”
There is probably no album that Jack White could have released for his solo debut that would have fully made good on all the considerable expectations that have been building now for years. With his talents and various influences spread throughout longer works of collaboration over the years – most recently, the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, not to mention more subtle appearances as producer/player with artists like Wanda Jackson – there has always been a diverse range of moments where White’s influence has made itself recognizable. Here, it is Jack White all the time, and the songs do – understandably, as on any album – fall into patterns and larger trends which are, at first, unusual for White’s work. This all being said, given the opportunity, Blunderbuss is the deep, dark, quirky work that we expect and desire from White; tracks like the standout “Freedom at 21” and “Love Interruption,” back to back on the album, show off two sonic extremes that White has mastered. The following song, the title track, takes it down a notch further even. All in all, for me at least, this album suffered from the evil of high expectations. It’s taken me the better part of the year to come back to the album again after the initial listening party that was the week after its release; what I’ve found is an excellent collection of well-written lyrics and overall eclectic songwriting: a strong album that is suggestive of the great work that is still to come from Jack White in the years to come.
Little Broken Hearts (Norah Jones)
Producer: Danger Mouse
Released: April 25, 2012
Rating: 3 / 5 stars
Top Two Tracks: “Good Morning” & “4 Broken Hearts”
In the past, I haven’t followed the music or the career of Norah Jones all that closely. When I learned that Danger Mouse would be producing the new album, I was intrigued. The resulting album Little Broken Hearts is predictably subversive: slow and elusive at times but always with a strong, quirky sense of rhythm. Of course, Norah Jones’ vocals – as they did in her appearance on the Danger Mouse-produced Rome – are a beautifully layered coat of paint applied to the dry bones of the instrumentation. Some tracks stand apart from the rest, perhaps most notably in the opener “Good Morning.” Much of the album requires patience, which is perhaps a way of admitting it lacks drive at times, or at best that it is artistically rendered in such a way as to make easy listening, quick enjoyment difficult.
The White Stripes’ “Under Great White Northern Lights” (2010) – MAYBE SO
The White Stripes' "Under Great White Northern Lights" (2010)
(March 16, 2010)
Review:
On their first live album, Jack and Meg White deliver adrenaline-fueled, frenetic performances of some of the best material from their catalog, tearing through each song with a raw energy that displays a simultaneous mastery of and disregard for form.
