With their third outing Dodge And Burn, The Dead Weather quartet found a patchwork of days over a year and half to create an album’s worth of material in Nashville. Releasing four tracks since 2013 in a long-foreplay romance with fans, their slow-drip offering flies in the face of the our instant-gratification conditioning (with dismissal always on its heels). In turn you may be forgiven for expecting a no-surprises collection of lost-dog tracks disjointedly gathered for the next LP run – but you’d be dead wrong.
The Nashville-housed quartet featuring Jack White on drums has marked its turf with increasing potency from its 2009 debut, Horehound, through 2010’s Sea of Cowards. With Dodge and Burn, an expressionistic peak looks out with more ferocity and flavor than ever before. While TDW can be catalogued among Jack’s numerous & meticulously schizophrenic palette outlets, it’s clearly an ensemble architecture, the core components vital to the complicated flavor. These instruments are characters, as vivid as any vocal, and the expression’s vital nuance is not transplantable.
To hell with those meat & potatoes jams that hit you over the head with one thick primary-color persona. This is the music you put on for the midnight drive to kill the villain, headed for a road house haunt on the outskirts of a future-grit murder zone. No quarter is offered from the Moog analog delay get-go with “I Feel Love (Every Million Miles),” a Lazaretto flare through a funked-Zeppelin riff. Across Dodge and Burn’s forty-two minutes of fuzz-pulse bass, psych-wild keys, foundational jazz-staccato beats and vocal strut-ferocity, the popped leather collar never once veers away from authentic attitude.
Alison Mosshart’s seduction has no innocence left within it – she’s a focused and feral muse gone wild, a switchblade threat and a whiskey-bottle fist at the front of the coolest goddamn gang in Rock. “Let Me Through” is your deepest evidence, a mod-squad cool raiding the greaser closet, checking yourself out in the Wanted poster behind a cigarette. That’s all before the binaural vocal duality in Mosshart’s vocal – as we cross minute three – blasts open with a howl and squealing guitar freakout over a bash-and-crash beat.
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Further down the tom-popping path, Jack takes the mic at the onset of the hauntedly fucking weird “Three Dollar Hat” – a violent squealing oddity of murder and a bad man named Jackie Lee. Once you imagine Jay Z’s voice in place of Jack’s, you can’t unhear it. But a machine-gun beat later, Mosshart has snatched the mic away and tore off down a new road, kickin’ up a reverb-soaked dust storm on her way through the chorus and back to Jack.
That dual-vocal volley bounces through 2013’s 7” single teaser “Rough Detective” as well, the shimmy-shakin’ dolphin calls and “what’s happening” stutter-thrusts finally snatching full attention from White’s pulverizing beats. A breath and a scream later, ominous guitars creep into the explosive spasms of “Open Up (That’s Enough),” another early-single stare right into the heart of this wild and intricate blade of a record. We’re also familiar with “Too Bad” from previous release, jangling psychedelia with a Grace Slick fever.
Dodge and Burn is finely crafted insanity, a retro-threaded storm of punk-blooded greatness, without apology or allegiance to anyone but their own. You leave the record wanting to be in the gang, an accessory to whatever crimes may come. And that’s just what they want.
Look for Dodge and Burn on September 25 via Third Man.
