Album: The Dead Weather, Sea of Cowards (Third Man/Warner Bros)

Arriving with uncommon haste just 10 months after their debut Horehound, Dead Weather's Sea Of Cowards simply confirms that, although Jack White can't prevent his creative restlessness dragging him ever onwards, activity alone is no guarantee of quality.

Sometimes better to pause. Perhaps if he had done that with Sea Of Cowards, the second half of the album wouldn't degenerate into such a drab sequence of forgettable riffs, lazily strung together as plinths for bouts of unremarkable guitar-mangling. The opener "Blue Blood Blues" is far and away the best thing here, Jack squawking "I love you so much I don't need to exist" over a simple but compelling Zep-style fuzz-riff; but thereafter things deteriorate rapidly, with Alison Mossman's vocals accelerating the decline into incoherency.

Download this: Blue Blood Blues; Hustle And Cuss