I wish I liked exercise. And healthy foods. And various forms of professional development. Cheaper forms of entertainment. Learning new languages. Doing chores around the house. There’s a lot of stuff I wish I liked, but as much as I want to like them, I simply don’t. Some things are simply too boring to enjoy even if I can appreciate they are technically pretty good.
Add The Dead Weather’s new album Dodge and Burn to that list.
Jack White and lead singer Alison Mosshart are two of my favorite rock vocalists, and I suppose that still holds true on Dodge and Burn. The backing band is as tight as ever, too. I’ve always enjoyed White’s drumming, which alternates between understated and bombastic. Guitarist Dean Fertita and bassist Jack Lawrence are both fantastic musicians, and Fertita especially gets plenty of room on this album to show off his chops.
The problem here isn’t in ability. All the pieces individually sound pretty good. If I were to remove any piece of many of these songs and place them in a different song, in a different context, that piece would very likely hold up as a strong point. The problem with Dodge and Burn is those pieces don’t mesh in a way that is interesting to me, and that’s a problem with two causes.
Through three albums, The Dead Weather has operated on a mixture of swagger and weirdness. Mosshart’s other band, The Kills, operates on swagger, too. It’s how her voice shines. White, on the other hand, brings most of the weirdness, which should come as no surprise given how his best work always delved into the odder side of rock.
Both the swagger and weirdness fall flat here. It’s almost as if they wrote down a list of the things that made their previous two albums successful, and checked each item off the list as they went. I can hear the strain of them trying too hard to make those items happen, which is directly connected to the second cause.
Almost every song here has a more interesting, better executed counterpart on previous albums. Nearly every song on Dodge and Burn made me want to turn off this album and turn on a previous album. Listening to these songs is like looking at identical twins where one twin is gorgeous and the other one is horribly disfigured through a terrible accident. Even though the genetics are the same, one is clearly more aesthetically pleasing. I don’t tend to enjoy things on a purely molecular level alone, so this horribly disfigured album loses my attention.
This is especially true of the song “Three Dollar Hat,” which brings to mind Horehound‘s “I Cut Like a Buffalo.” Except this song is stripped of “Buffalo”s laid back weirdness and surprise that a quasi-reggae jam would appear on a garage rock album. “Three Dollar Hat” feels like an empty shell of an idea.
Elsewhere, the album tries very hard to rock, but lacks the bite of Horehound‘s “Treat Me Like Your Mother.” The opening trio of songs aim high for balls-to-the-walls badassery but don’t sound believable. Horehound often went for the throat. Second album Sea of Cowards took a more pop bent on garage rock. This album takes the halfway stance between both without being as good as either.
The lone standout in an album of mediocre songs is the fantastic closer, “Impossible Winner.” Mosshart belts it out in a song reminiscent of a Poe song. It’s beautiful and vulnerable and completely unlike the entire rest of Dodge and Burn.
If the Dead Weather had doubled down on their rock ballads, this review would have read differently. Maybe that version of Dodge and Burn would have failed, but at least it wouldn’t be a collection of rehashed ideas. I can respect a band that fails trying something new. I have trouble respecting a band that fails doing the same old thing.
For as much as I’ve ripped Dodge and Burn apart, it isn’t a bad album exactly. I can’t call this unlistenable. The Dead Weather is a band of professionals who, even at their least interesting, can make music that won’t make anyone cringe. It’s just that it won’t make anyone want to listen for very long, either. I wish I could like this, but it’s simply too boring. Luckily, if I want my Dead Weather fix, I’ll just listen to their previous two albums instead.
Rating: 2.25/5