You could never accuse Jack White of resting on his laurels. A year after he unveiled his latest “other” group, the Dead Weather, at a poky North London club, the White Stripes frontman-turned-drummer and his allies were back in the more salubrious surroundings of the Roundhouse with a second album, Sea of Cowards, to promote. The sense of a group hurtling, pell mell, towards the next staging post was reflected in a show that delivered the musical content in tandem with a full-on assault on the senses.
Seated behind a curiously configured drum kit — its hardware arranged in such a way that nothing should obscure the star himself — White hammered his way through one heavily rocked-up groove after another. During Hang You From the Heavens he incorporated some flashy stick twirling moves, while in front of him the singer Alison Mosshart strutted and stomped around the stage like a demonic scarecrow that had suddenly sprung into life. “I’d like to grab you by the hair/And drag you to the devil,” she sang in the blood-curdling shriek that remains her default vocal setting.
To either side of her the comparatively mild-mannered bass player Jack Lawrence and the guitarist and keyboard player Dean Fertita cranked out monster-sized blues-rock riffs with the muscular touch of men well versed in the techniques of musical heavy lifting.
Everyone was dressed in black and then more black, while the stage was bathed in pools of shadow and clouds of smoke underneath a backdrop decorated with a huge, baleful, unblinking eye. Every so often, retina-searing white lights flashed straight into the audience’s eyes — the visual equivalent of a migraine, and about as appealing.
The performance may have had the same raw, visceral appeal of their landmark London show a year ago, but there was a growing sense of certain structural cracks in the material being papered over. While new songs including The Difference Between Us and Hustle and Cuss had an immediate tug, the spontaneity of the group’s songwriting methods made for a lot of loose ends. White strapped on a guitar for an epic finale of Will There Be Enough Water, a version that went way over the top in every department. With lights flashing, guitars squealing and voices shrieking — everything louder than everything else — they took their hectic leave.