Live: the Dead Weather at the Roxy

Mosshart's mercurial presence, aggressive but often seemingly unhinged, refashions hard rock singing as something more intuitive and receptive than it has been in the hands of the male stars she also sometimes recalls, like Jim Morrison or Axl Rose. She's a far cry from the typical 21st century pop ingenue, whose poise is a pose. Mosshart doesn't pose. She's too busy throwing her weight around.

At the Roxy, Mosshart spent much of her time actually on the floor, falling there in fits that signified surrender to both the bad love the lyrics described and the din the group created. Fertita, alternating between a Moog keyboard and guitar, practiced the garage rocker's art of dirtying up vintage riffs and chord changes, while Lawrence was unflashy and highly sympathetic to White's splashy, though solid, drumming.

The set's songs, most from the Dead Weather's debut album, "Horehound," to be issued July 14 on White's own Third Man label, were backward-looking without being exactly traditionalist. A few covers, including one of Bob Dylan's "New Pony," rounded out the list. The band kept its approach wide open, breaking the songs down into fragile jams, letting feedback and clatter and other random noise seep in, playing with the sonic rust of old instruments.

Led Zeppelin was obviously invoked -- Jimmy Page, sitting in the back of the VIP era, was the show's most whispered-about attendee. But the Dead Weather's debt to younger blues innovators like the Patti Smith Group, the Dream Syndicate and the White Stripes themselves was most obvious.

For all its touchstones, the band projected a unique charisma, rooted in Mosshart's intensity and the looking-glass distortions triggered by her back-and-forth with White. It's not often a man and a woman have successfully shared the lead role in a band. When they do, the old, often macho structures of rock receive a blow, even when the music itself isn't all that innovative.

Who's in the center of this picture? It doesn't stop moving long enough for anyone to tell.

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ann.powers@latimes.com