Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on May 2010

Warner

Jack White and supergroup co-conspirators Alison Mosshart (The Kills), Dean Fertita (The Raconteurs, Queens of the Stone Age) and Jack Lawrence (ditto) didn’t waste any time following up their 2009 debut Horehound with another outing of gritty guitar fuzz and psychedelic wailings. White is virtuosic as usual, and Mosshart does a fantastic Grace Slick circa San Francisco 1968, but one can’t help feeling that—stripped of their ’60s counterculture context—there’s something important missing from these songs. The sonic references to Led Zep, Jefferson Airplane et al. and witty lines like “Shake your hips like battleships” are entertaining enough, but it’s not until the last few songs that White and co. begin to coalesce around some new sounds. “Looking at the Invisible Man” takes blues-rock into uncharted, digitally warped territory, while “Old Mary” is an off-kilter meditation on mortality that features White declaiming about the Virgin in preacher-like fashion against a background of dirge synths and crackling effects.