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    The Dead Weather is more than just a side project

    Jack White and company know how to rock.

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    No other band in recent memory has been able to do what Jack White has done with The Dead Weather. The band apparently formed by accident, had its first live performance before even putting out its first single and booked its first tour before releasing its first album.

    Music critics everywhere were hailing The Dead Weather as the next big thing even before the band played its first public show. But at its Columbus performance Saturday night, The Dead Weather certainly lived up to all the hype.

    White’s new band features music veterans Alison Mosshart of The Kills, bassist Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs and guitarist Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stone Age.

    A divergence from his previous bands, White mostly plays drums in The Dead Weather but the band members effortlessly switch up their instruments on a few songs without interrupting the flow of the show or breaking the continuity of the music.

    All four members, donning beautiful white Gretsch guitars and dressed in contrasting dark clothes, looked ethereal against the projection screen backdrop of Horehound’s eerie album art.

    The foursome opened with “60 Feet Tall” with Mosshart casually smoking a cigarette on stage, setting the tone for the rest of the show. Mosshart is one of those musicians who puts her whole body into performing. Her thin, model-like frame writhed jerkily and nervously on stage and she shook her long brown mane in an angsty rage.

    Wearing gray skinny jeans, a leopard-print blouse and wailing lyrics like “I’ve done some bad things and they get easier to do,” Mosshart played the part of the emblematic bad girl but with a hint of shyness and unease.

    The Dead Weather has a blues rock sound that has slight traces of The White Stripes and The Raconteurs, but is uniquely edgy, heavy and at times surprisingly minimalist. In many of their songs, Mosshart and White’s dueling vocals cry and whine in a call-and-response format and one can imagine them as angry lovers fighting musically.

    Though White provides lead vocals to some songs like “Cut Like a Buffalo,” Mosshart’s presence overpowers her fellow musicians on stage. White is hidden largely by his drum set and mop of black hair while Fertita and Lawrence are the quiet and underrated talent that completes the group.

    Some songs like “Bone House” are simple and repetitive yet the lyrics were ambiguous and cryptic like The Dead Weather members know something they’re not ready to reveal to their audience. Perhaps one of the best songs of the night was “So Far From Your Weapon,” which features Mosshart on lead vocals. Mosshart starts off soft but slowly gets louder and more powerful with The Dead Weather boys echoing Mosshart in bluesy howls.

    The band returned for a two-song finale and Mosshart, like she opened the show, held a cigarette limply in one hand with the microphone in the other. The foursome performed “Treat Me Like Your Mother” and “New Pony” with as much awkward energy and musical rage as their opening song.

    Though all the members are involved with other bands, Saturday’s show ascertained that The Dead Weather is more than just a side project but a serious musical group that’s capable of not only putting out a good album but also delivering a strong performance. There was something about their live show that made their music sound better than the record, which is true with a lot of bands. Their tone, their body language and their idiosyncrasies are all things that can’t be picked up just by listening to Horehound a few times.

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