Album reviews: ‘Sea of Cowards’ by the Dead Weather

The Dead Weather

“Sea of Cowards”

Third Man / Warner Bros.

Three and a half stars

In the Dead Weather’s world, love has nothing to do with flowers and chocolates; it’s all about grenades and flak jackets.

“When you’re so close to me,” the magnetic Alison Mosshart sings in “Gasoline” from the band’s sophomore album, “I can smell the gasoline.... I don’t want a sweetheart, sweetheart/I want a machine.”

The Dead Weather’s unrelenting commitment to exploring the outer limits of human passion is consistently breathtaking here. A lot of musicians approach that theme from a safe distance, but Mosshart, drummer Jack White, guitarist-keyboardist Dean Fertita and bassist Jack Lawrence utterly subsume the listener in a musical onslaught that exhibits not so much as a shred of moderation.

What elevates Dead Weather above so many less mindful practitioners of heavy music is that it comes up with songs that are the equivalent of smart bombs. They zero in on a target rather than indiscriminately obliterating everything for miles around.

“Blue Blood Blues” understands the negation of self that can happen in an all-consuming affair: “Yeah, I love you so much/I don’t need to exist.” That idea returns in “Looking at the Invisible Man”: “Wave your hands in the dark, woman/You’re looking at me.” A duet between Mosshart and White, “Die by the Drop,” turns the marriage vow inside out: “I’m gonna take you for worse or for better/To my little grave.” And in “I’m Mad,” Mosshart and the band are at once convincingly enraged and flirting with insanity.

The group’s debut oozed with chemistry, and that musical empathy has just grown stronger and tighter here. And both in songwriting and musical execution — the operative word throughout here — the Dead Weather has crafted the equivalent of a taut, expertly directed movie thriller. “I’m gonna make you understand,” Mosshart snarls in “I Can’t Heart You,” “There’s nobody you can trust but me.”

That’s not a promise…

—Randy Lewis

Hoping to make news

with her music

Chely Wright

Lifted Off the Ground

Vanguard

Two and a half stars

Well, it worked.

A certain newspaper, likely to have bypassed country singer-songwriter Chely Wright’s new album, “Lifted Off the Ground” — if for no other reason than it being a busy week for new releases — has decided it warrants a review, based on Wright’s revealing last week that she’s a lesbian. This newspaper won’t be the only one; it’s the business we’re in, of biting the dangling carrot so you don’t have to.

Despite scoring a big hit with 1999’s “Single White Female” and her connections to Brad Paisley, Wright, nine albums deep and almost 40, isn’t much known outside country music circles.

Wright’s latest work and corresponding publicity stunt aims to correct that, and for the album’s part, it’s a noble, if too polite, effort. With its cleanly picked acoustics and suede-soft vocals, “Lifted Off the Ground” is nothing if not finely crafted.

But where’s the teeth? Sure, she sounds mad on “Damn Liar” but as far as making statements about her “lifestyle,” in a genre often defined by traditional notions of sexuality and family, Wright treads lightly.

“Heavenly Days” centers around a “Tennessee tomboy” and a “feminine girl,” two lovers that are “nobody’s master, nobody’s slave.” The gender-political subtext is provocative and fertile but could she have tilled a little bit more?

If Wright’s going to make her sexuality a calculated component of her career, then why not use these songs to challenge the system? She’s done it before with her 2004 song, “Bumper of My SUV,” which takes liberals to task for knee-jerk reactions to military support. Maybe on her next outing, Wright will save a little of that spitfire for the cause that might be closest to her heart.

—Margaret Wappler

Calling on her

powerful pals

Charice

“Charice”

(143/Reprise)

Two stars

In the 2 1/2 years since Ellen DeGeneres featured this young Filipina singer on her popular talk show, Charice has racked up an impressive number of friends in high places: She’s made several appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” sung duets with Andrea Bocelli and Celine Dion and signed a record deal with David Foster, the soft-pop impresario behind Josh Groban and Michael Bublé.

Today she’s scheduled to appear on “Oprah” yet again, this time alongside Justin Bieber. (Like Bieber, Charice built an initial following on YouTube, where displays of precocious vocal talent are outnumbered only by videos of babies tasting lemons.)

Charice’s self-titled international debut contains input from some of those powerful pals, including Foster, the set’s executive producer; “Replay” singer Iyaz and such A-list songwriters as Ryan Tedder, Diane Warren and Carole Bayer Sager. Inevitably, the result darts somewhat haphazardly from sleek dance-pop tunes aimed at girls Charice’s age (“I Love You,” “Pyramid”) to schmaltzy slow jams seemingly intended for those girls’ moms (“All That I Need to Survive,” “Note to God”).

If “Charice” lacks any kind of stylistic focus, though, it also feels like an honest showcase of the singer’s voice, with relatively uncluttered arrangements and limited vocal processing. There’s nothing especially interesting about that voice beyond its technical sophistication; any character is a product of inheritance, not invention. But its strength lives up to that of her collaborators.

—Mikael Wood

A romantic, rural

American sound

Everest

“On Approach”

Vapor Records/Warner Bros.

Two stars

The five local boys who comprise Everest paint their second album with images of Midwestern towns and melting, snow-capped skyscrapers. Home base may be Los Angeles, but Everest has designs on something a bit more wide open.

In the tradition of our city’s Laurel Canyon musicians, Everest conjures the sound of a more rural America, and often with studied romanticism. With “On Approach,” released on Neil Young-affiliated Vapor Records, Everest attempts to view folk rock at its most expansive. “Tall Buildings” recalls “Imagine”-era John Lennon, with acoustics and harmonies lifted by a graceful organ, and “Dots” brings to mind Wilco’s Jay Bennett-bolstered arrangements, as a small string section gradually envelopes the calm-voiced Russell Pollard.

The band shows off a more feisty side on album opener “Let Go,” in which a trembling keyboard gets rattled by a rhythmic thundercloud and Pollard’s vocals take on more bite. One can’t help but wish Everest had further explored the track’s spaced-out tension.

As it stands, Everest is a working band’s band (indeed, each member is a veteran of the local rock scene), and the light atmospherics and deliberate musicianship will no doubt please many a music supervisor. Even when Everest touches on bar-band blues on “I’ve Had This Feeling Before,” it’s more careful than raucous, and by the time the band reaches the slide-enhanced album midpoint that is “East Illinois,” Everest has settled into a comfortable routine.

—Todd Martens