The Italy label has been home to some of the most expensive White Stripes rarities, each pressed on 7” in varying colours of precious vinyl, and each one increasing in value by the month. But before the gruesome twosome first wrote the nu-blues template, Jack White moonlighted in The Hentchmen, mostly on bass, of all things.
Venturing onto CD for the first time, this 14-tracker documents those years (or rather, 1998), and finds the longstanding Detroit four-piece feral, retroactive and somewhat underwhelming. On the covetable Lieber & Stoller-covering 45, Some Other Guy, the sound is totally right and in context, but when lobbed in with the high levels of quasi-singalong Who/ Yardbirds-esque riffage found on Big Screen Lover and R&R Lover, it loses something. As you’d expect, White obviously holds the attention, his backing vocal squawk and high-in-the-mix occasional guitar (especially on a cover of The Yardbirds’ Psycho Daisies) a raw tonic and a sign of things to come.
Moments of genuine excitement are few and far between. Track down the singles if you can; it’s a clich�, but they’re far truer to the art form that this compilation sprang from.
