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Horehound
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 29 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 31 votes
Read user comments
Rate this album >
Album Info
Label: WEA/Reprise
Release Date: 14 July 2009
Discs: 1 disc
Genre(s): Rock, Alternative
Summary
Jack White plays drums and produced this album for the band headed by The Kills' Alison Mosshart, which also includes The Raconteurs' Jack Lawrence and Queens of the Stone Age's Dean Fertita.
Also On Metacritic
MUSIC: The Kills: Keep On Your Mean Side The Kills: Midnight Boom The Kills: No Wow The Raconteurs: Broken Boy Soldiers The Raconteurs: Consolers Of The Lonely The White Stripes: Elephant The White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan The White Stripes: Icky Thump The White Stripes: White Blood Cells
Also On The Web: Official Artist Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Los Angeles Times
There's no joke here--just mountains of chest-rattling primal rock designed to reassert the elemental power of the four-piece rock group. Mission accomplished.
Read Full Review >MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
White's drums duke it out with Dean Fertita's guitar, mostly below the belt. Alison Mosshart doffs her s&m drag to suffer and yelp. Jack Lawrence plays bass. Fierce.
Read Full Review >Paste Magazine
The foursome weave a dizzying web of traditions into their own rough-hewn sound, dragging vestiges of alt-rock, punk and blues through the mud to achieve an album rife with brash dissonance.
Read Full Review >PopMatters
While the Dead Weather might not necessarily surpass the accomplishments of its impressive pedigree, it’s certainly more uncompromising, brutal, menacing, honest.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone
With Raconteurs bassist Jack Lawrence and guitarist-organist Dean Fertita helping out, the pair cut Horehound in three weeks, but these are all top-notch songs, rooted in Seventies dirtbag rock.
Read Full Review >musicOMH.com
The debut is by no means a hit-packed record, pop is firmly on the backburner here and thrillingly it's precisely this lack of obvious choruses and instead the bizarre little instrumental interludes, spooky stripped down ballads which build and build and attacking grooves that will have you coming back time and time again to it.
Read Full Review >Alternative Press
There's no denying the quartet know how to work a mighty groove as well as set up atmospheres similar to bands remanded to the faded pages of old record-collecting magazines. [July 2009, p.126]
Mojo
As you hit repeat to hear Horehound for the umpteenth time, what's remarkable is that these 11 tunes, with their sonic curveballs and causl vim, suggest that a second Dead Weather LP would be almost as welcome as the White Stripes' seventh. [Jul 2009, p.90]
Billboard
The propulsive 11-track Horehound finds the White Stripes and Raconteurs frontman every bit as able on the drums as he is on guitar.
Read Full Review >Prefix Magazine
Horehound doesn’t sound like the first album from a tossed-off side project; it crackles with the intensity of a band that has been together longer than a few months.
Read Full Review >The Phoenix
Horehound isn't White Stripes tea-party cutesy, and it's not Raconteurs good-times eclectic--it's nothing but riffs and 'tude all the way through.
Read Full Review >Pitchfork
The songs on Horehound don't so much rock as writhe, reinstituting the idea of the blues as a sinister, morally corrupting force that's as much the province of voodoo priests and witch doctors as musicians.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly
The first half of Horehound is just weird enough to be utterly mesmerizing, a series of ominous, fuzzed-out psycho-blues riffs that climax in the tremendous Rush-meets-Jay-Z rave-up of 'Treat Me Like Your Mother.' But creative disintegration floods the record's latter regions with less captivating bump-'n'-grindhouse grooves.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club)
The Dead Weather is a true collaboration, with each band member providing songs (along with input into one another’s songs), and this bunch is talented enough to make even the tracks that are all mood sound just about right.
Read Full Review >Tiny Mix Tapes
The tracks blister with attitude and grit, but the persistent monochrome grows a bit exhausting all coughed out at once. The bitter sandstorm could stand more punctuation, even if it did make Horehound less terrifying.
Read Full Review >Urb
This album showcases the fact that every member stepped up to this creative challenge. A thoroughly enjoyable departure until we hear from Jack and Meg.
Read Full Review >No Ripcord
It’s a maiden voyage with a few kinks that need to be worked out. One promising aspect is White’s new pet project, The Kills singer Alison Mosshart.
Read Full Review >Slant Magazine
Her voice simply doesn't have the heft to project the necessary menace. Despite these occasional missteps, though, Horehound establishes the Dead Weather as a fully-realized band with a sufficiently distinctive point of view that deserves serious consideration as more than just a one-off side project.
Read Full Review >All Music Guide
Given the fact that the Dead Weather formed on a whim and recorded these songs in a matter of weeks, Horehound is a compelling album, and one that shows that the band's members bring out the best in each other, albeit in unexpected ways.
Read Full Review >Observer Music Monthly
Despite the speed at which it came together, the album sounds as polished. But sometimes you wish he would reach beyond his grab-bag of influences and push out something with shocks-a-mighty.
Read Full Review >Q Magazine
Horehound's strengths are also its weaknesses--the rush with which it came together, the sense that it amounts to Jack White playing to type. But like Jack White, too, when it's good, it's very, very good. [Aug 2009, p.102]
Dot Music
Perhaps with a bit more effort converting the jams into actual songs this would have been a worthy jump off as opposed to the album's incandescent highlight. Your forecast then, occasional flashes of brilliance but largely dreary.
Read Full Review >Uncut
The Dead Weather is another slightly unsatisfying fling alongside The Raconteurs. [Jul 2009, p.84]
Under The Radar
It's the perfect summer album for anyone who was a huge Zeppelin fan in high school. [Summer 2009, p.60]
The Guardian
As it is, it starts promising, but ends up feeling like the very thing it purports not to be: another calling card for Jack White's multifarious talents.
Read Full Review >Drowned In Sound
Its creators will surely insist that they’re proud of their work and that’s all the approval they need. All the same, it’d probably be nice for them if you could imagine anyone who didn’t already like The White Stripes and/or The Kills buying this.
Read Full Review >New Musical Express
Away from his day job, White is less creatively liberated, and surrounding The Dead Weather there's a very strong whiff of conventional, rather clumpy Middle-America jock rock.
Read Full Review >cokemachineglow
The Dead Weather makes smegma rock. It’s a squirming, nauseating label no doubt, but so is Horehound, convinced that skuzzed-up guitars and swamp blues roots demand sleaze, humidity, and grime.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this album is 8.0 (out of 10) based on 31 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Jimmy M. gave it a10:
Simply superb.
M S. gave it a7:
This isn't a bad album - not great but not bad. Alison Mosshart adds some great vocals and the musicianship is very good. Can't help feeling that Jack White is diluting himself too much though. This is the worst of his side-projects (which shows just how good a rock star he actually is).
Czar gave it a9:
Allison Mossheart is just the best. I am large Kills fan, I like the white stripes (but got a bit bored with them). Horehound rocks - it is what rock should be raw, rough violent, black - awesome. Growling guitars, good skin sounds - heady and captivating - nice job I hope they keep going.
drew p gave it a10:
Blues and rock and punk (and hip-hop??) It's not difficult to spot the influences here, but it's impossible not to be impressed by the way they're combined here to make the most exciting rock album of the year. If nothing else, check Treat Me Like Your Mother and Cut Like a Buffalo.
Walt C. gave it a9:
I saw the Dead Weather live in Minneapolis last night. Great show (other than the strobe-y lighting effects - that was annoying) is support of a top-notch album. The Dylan cover "New Pony" is really raw. Mosshart is a great foil to Jack White. Great musical tension. Fertita and Lawrence round out an excellent ensemble.
amos B gave it a3:
Jack White?? Who CARES?!!? VV Alison Mosshart is the postmodern blues genius in this band, but this record ISN'T EVEN CLOSE to The Kills' brilliant 'Midnight Boom' of 2009. This album sounds like an afterthought recorded in 12 hours for all of the talent involved. A mammoth disappointment.
Jordan S gave it a10:
Simply one of the best albums of 2009. No doubt.
