The Sound and Fury of The Dead Weather

Last Friday night The Dead Weather strode purposefully onto the stage of Chicago's Congress Theater (a barely acceptable venue for music) and conducted a full-frontal sound-and-vision assault on the near-capacity crowd. With Jack White spending most of the night cleanly driving the band with straight-ahead drumming, Jack Lawrence on bass, Dean Fertita on lead guitar, and Alison Mosshart on deep-throated banshee vocals, The Dead Weather ripped through almost all of the cuts from their first two CDs, tossing in a cover version of Them's "You Just Can't Win" for good measure.

Like any number of bands whose live shows outshine their recorded efforts (Eurythmics and Cowboy Junkies come to mind), The Dead Weather made it clear they are a band to see live. Anyone who's listened closely to Horehound and Sea of Cowards had to feel that there is something there that doesn't translate onto plastic and aluminum. Friday night The Dead Weather showed everyone what those CDs are missing: Fury.

Though not a knock on the CDs, the energy these four displayed on stage simply cannot be heard and probably can't be captured in a studio setting. It almost spewed off the stage, starting with Mosshart's whirling, crawling, bending, stretching, climbing dervish of a lead singer. From opener "No Horse" on through "I Cut Like a Buffalo," "So Far From Your Weapon," and "60 Feet Tall" she commanded the stage front and center, giving way only a few times to play rhythm guitar or smack a tamborine when White slid out from the skins to play lead. She would have shown Mick Jagger a thing or two, slinking and dancing around to the beat or not as if she inhabited the music -- or vice versa. Mosshart lives where Jagger preens and plays, and when she and White hooked up lip to lip over the centerstage mic the juice could have powered the intense, unrelenting light show that bombarded the crowd.

This is raw music, and not in an unfinished sense. It cuts and it pounds and it's powerful and it's very, very loud, a barrage of crisp drums, clashing cymbals, thumping bass and slashing, screeching guitars. And when Lawrence takes over the drum set and White takes up the guitar, as on the exquisite pre-encore set closer "Will There Be Enough Water?," the Mosshart/Lawrence/Fertita threesome generated a sonic current that an electrified White rode for an epic blues-tinged solo -- the finest music of the night.

The articles and reviews about this band always refer to it as "Jack White's side project" and lists each band member with a nod to the bands they are originally from. That does The Dead Weather a disservice. Though slightly more than a year old this band plays with one another, off one another, and together with all the fury music like this demands. See them live.