With new album, Dodge And Burn, due out on Friday the 25th September, The Dead Weather are back and louder than ever and if their latest single release, I Feel Love (Every Million Miles), is anything to go by it should be another big record for the hard-rocking supergroup. Returning to the music fray following a five year gap since their last studio album, Sea Of Cowherds, in 2010, the new material sees them continuing where they left off at the forefront of rock potential.
If you didn’t already know that Jack White is one of the four founding members of The Dead Weather, one listen to the guitar strikes in the opening bars of I Feel Love will be enough to confirm it. The heavy hooks would feel at home in the mix with a number of tracks from either Blunderbuss or Lazaretto, with the main difference being the female lead vocals, provided as ever by the brilliant Alison Mosshart.
They’re a gnarled and snarling development of her supreme presence in The Kills, but without the stripped-back scarcity they’re free to wail high, wide and very handsome. The fact that keys and guitar come from Dean Fertita of Racontours and Queens Of The Stone Age fame and bass is supplied by Jack Lawrence, also of the Racontours, rounds out the backdrop to the visceral new single.
You can listen to the track for yourself in the music video stream below, but be prepared to fight fruitlessly with an overriding urge to turn up the volume, rip holes in your jeans, grow your hair out long and invest in a second hand leather jacket from eBay as a result. Released at the end of August 2015, it’s been doing the rounds on radio for a little while now, but if you haven’t already got a plan to get set for the album launch next week you might want to take out your Filofax and pencil in an entry or two.
The video is a classically dark affair with Mosshart stalking down a lamp-lit street with wind whipping her every move as she leans in to the onslaught of the track. Her slender frame may not be strong enough to hold her up against the gale the entire way, but her voice is enough to shout down a hurricane as she rips out some very cool lines, including our favourite, “what does the black top know that I have not cracked with my mind”, which is genius.
A big highlight for us is the guitar-fuelled interlude, which pounds out the single’s core riff with slow intensity and with the kind of bass notes underpinning it that John Paul Jones would be proud of. Alison Mosshart’s vocals find a new level of attack at this point as they rip out the lines like a steel bar on sheet metal as the song builds to its reverberating bass note ending.
I Feel Love is a powerhouse new single from The Dead Weather and it sets things up well for Dodge And Burn to take the number 1 spot in album charts all over the world (OK, maybe not North Korea, but we can live in hope). It’s dark, brooding and ferocious, which is exactly what rock needs every now and again to shake things up and that’s exactly what the track does.
The Dead Weather, I Feel Love single review: 4.8/5
