Over the past couple of years, my inbox has teemed with press releases making ample use of the word “supergroup.” It seemed that 2008-09 were to bands what 1978-79 were to marriage—indie artists worth their salt need to partner swap to stay with it. Sticking the tour van keys into a bowl at the beginning of the party, M. Ward and Jim James pulled out Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis’ to form Monsters of Folk, while James Iha and Adam Schlesinger got Taylor Hanson and Bun E. Carlos to form the weirdest generational mash up ever, Tinted Windows. But a couple of greedy gents dipped their mitts in twice, forming bands on the side of their side bands, and only one will be allowed to get away with it.

Jack White and Josh Homme are both reigning kings of the retro-rock scene: The former for founding two-piece garage-rock machine the White Stripes, and the latter for leading the rowdy riff rock of Queens of the Stone Age. White got a jump on the supergroup trend when, in 2005, he formed the Raconteurs with Brendan Benson and Greenhorns members Patrick Keeler and Jack Lawrence, and then doubled down in 2009, sliding behind the drum set and bringing Jack Lawrence along to form the Dead Weather with the Kills’ Alison Mosshart and QOTSA’s Dean Fertita. Homme’s first side project—Eagles of Death Metal,which started in 1998, with its first album released in 2004—avoids the supergroup label, as its main lineup contains only Homme and friend Jesse “The Devil” Hughes, while his 2009 collaboration with Dave Grohl and legendary Led Zepplin bassist John Paul Jones is the textbook definition of the supergroup cliché, bringing together three rock powerhouses.

Does Mosshart give White the feminine balance he needs to edge out Homme and Hughe’s frat-boy tendencies? Or do Them Crooked Vultures trounce those pasty Raconteurs with their virile man rock? It all comes down to who has collected the coolest sets of co-conspirators, whose single rocks the hardest, and who’s got the sex appeal.

If band members were like baseball cards, and their value was determined by their stats, you’d want to collect the ones with the highest batting average, the ones with the most hits. When assembling a supergroup, you need to think like a baseball card collector, and between White and Homme, Homme obviously sees this more clearly. While White chose talented hometown friends like the Greenhorns and Benson and popular rocker pin-up Mosshart, he remains the sole member of both the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather with genuine hits under his belt. And though Eagles of Death Metal’s Hughes doesn’t rack up any points in the hit department, a member of Led Zeppelin and a member of both Nirvana and the Foo Fighters in Them Crooked Vultures make for one of the most hit-producing threesomes possible.

Then there is the strength of the single, the first chance a new side project has to assert itself as different from the main band (or the other side project, as it were). I didn’t love the Dead Weather’s single, “Treat Me Like Your Mother” on first listen. The riff is cool and the vintage vibe is aesthetically pleasing, but it’s just aping White’s and Mosshart’s day bands while lacking the barebones beauty of both the Kills and Stripes. The Raconteurs first single, “Steady as She Goes”, however, was incredibly strong, both in songwriting and in sound, and it appealed to a new set of listeners for White.

Them Crooked Vultures haven’t released a single per se, but “Scumbag Blues” and “Nobody Loves Me and Neither Do I” are album highlights. Both are big-balled metal chargers that build anticipation, but they also hint that perhaps there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Eagles of Death Metal’s “I Only Want You” set itself apart from QOTSA with Hughes’ eerie falsetto and launched the band’s individuality, and you can even kinda dance to it, but it didn’t take the world by storm. In the single category, it would appear to be a tie between Jack and Homme, each claiming good opening tunes but no great ones.

I saw “Treat Me Like Your Mother” in action, from backstage at the Dead Weather’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon taping. Trying to get worked up in a TV studio is like trying to get it on in a maternity ward—sterile and filled with shouting reminders of the consequences of your success. But without half a set to warm up, and despite the audience of a hundred seated tourists, when the first notes from the song’s riff hit, Mosshart was in an instant frenzy: Hair-flying, ass-in-the-air, madness. Seeing Mosshart throw herself backwards and forwards over that drum kit while White worked up a sweat, helpless in the face of her slinky, feline aggression without any of the mood-setting accoutrements of the live show… it trumped any hip-thrusting any man has ever done ever. Sorry Josh. So even though the Raconteurs look as if they’ve been trapped in mom’s attic since birth and the boys of Them Crooked Vultures have had more women thrown at them in their musical lifetimes than Heff and Henry VIII combined, the genius addition of the femme fatale wins the x-factor category.

This is a well-matched competition, with clear category wins for both sides. And it’s obvious that no one walks away a loser from this, since none of these side projects come off as more ego-driven and weird than genuine and cool. But at the end of the day, there has to be a winner, and ultimately, Josh Homme takes the prize. His 10-plus years of commitment to the Eagles of Death Metal and his incredible bagging of Grohl and Jones for Them Crooked Vultures makes him the Sovereign of the Side Band.

Watch: The Dead Weather, “I Cut Like a Buffalo” [at youtube.com]

Watch: Them Crooked Vultures, “Elephants” [at youtube.com]

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