Dead Weather, The - Sea Of Cowards [LP] (180 Gram, gatefold)

Their second album in as many years, the Dead Weather's sophomore effort is as feral and unrelenting as their debut. Released in May 2010, the lead-off track "Blue Blood Blues" would become one of the band's most loved songs. Sea of Cowards is noteworthy for being the FIRST record in history to contain songs hidden underneath the center labels of the disc. Legendary.

Born as a one-off collaboration between friends and tour mates, The Dead Weather has since evolved into one of the most vital and provocative bands in contemporary rock 'n' roll. Together Jack White, Alison Mosshart, Dean Fertita, and Jack Lawrence have created a dark magic all their own, a heavy brew of melding heavy riffs, thick beats, and blues snarl with raw soul power and unrelenting sexual energy.

The Dead Weather first united after Alison Mosshart's band The Kills supported Jack White and Jack Lawrence's band The Raconteurs on a string of North American dates. The trio followed the tour with a few informal recording sessions at White's famed Third Man studio, soon augmented by Raconteurs collaborator/Queens of the Stone Age multi-instrumentalist Dean Fertita. The result proved extraordinary – The Dead Weather's debut album, Horehound, arrived in July 2009 to worldwide critical acclaim and a top 10 Billboard 200 chart debut.

Released less than a year after their debut, Sea of Cowards made it abundantly clear The Dead Weather had become more than a side project – White, Mosshart, Lawrence, and Fertita were now a band. Ultimately named among the top 15 on Rolling Stone's "30 Best Albums of 2010," Sea of Cowards drew rave reviews for its aggressive song craft and overwhelming intensity.

Since then, The Dead Weather collective has remained busy as ever, constantly adding new milestones to their already-illustrious resumes.

Sea of Cowards isn't a radical change from Horehound's smoky, sludgy sound — if anything, White, Alison Mosshart, Dean Fertita, and Jack Lawrence go even deeper into their classic rock and blues fetishes — but it feels more organic, the product of a band instead of four separate personalities. A quick glance at the album's liner notes shows they wrote these songs in almost every conceivable combination, yet Sea of Cowards sounds more cohesive: dense and charged like the air just before a rainstorm, replete with fat basslines and heavy organ solos equally inspired by '70s album rock and silent movie scores.