Healthy White Baby (Broadmoor, 2005)

In music, the whole is not always related to the sum of the parts, and Healthy White Baby is a case in point. Given the band's pedigree - Danny Black from thrash country provocateurs the Blacks and Laurie Stirratt from Americana darlings Blue Mountain - one might assume the resulting collaboration would lean in either or both of those directions.

The problem is that line of thought doesn't take into account Black's feeling that he'd mined his country vein for all its worth and just wanted to rock the roadhouse in his next outfit. Enter classic power blues/rock trio Healthy White Baby, where bassist Stirratt and drummer Ryan Juravic lay down a solid groove for Black's massively meaty hooks, an amalgamation of Jack White's wack blues riffage with the White Stripes and Billy Zoom's frenetic punkabilly swing with X.

Make no mistake, Healthy White Baby rocks like crazy, burns like a double shot of Kentucky bourbon and goes to the head twice as fast.