The Raconteurs

“We’re a new band made up of old friends.” – Jack White (I assume)

“Well, that’s all well and good, Jack, but what am I supposed to do? I mean, it’s not like I have any talent.” – Meg White

“I can’t find the time to give you a quote, but I can find the time to take a week off and go to Aruba.” – Al

Albums Reviewed:

Broken Boy Soldiers

Consolers Of The Lonely

Apparently sick of not having anyone who doesn’t suck at music to work with, Jack White recruited his friend and power-pop practitioner Brendan Benson, along with some guys from a band called the Greenhornes to play bass and drums, and formed this exceedingly disposable yet fun side project this past year. And while Jack actually gives Brendan equal time and Brendan’s sweet, power-poppy (better then Geddy Lee!) voice sings as much as Jack’s charismatic, high-pitched yelp, Jack White is in this band, so I feel safe calling it his side project, no matter how much Brendan Benson wants to protest. Discussion of the album and its musical-related contents are contained in the review below. In your picture above, from left to right, are bassist Jack Lawrence, Brendan, Jack, and drummer Patrick Keeler. Hooray!

And, onto the review(s)!

Broken Boy Soldiers (2006)

Rating: 7

Best Song: “Steady, As She Goes”

This is kind of an odd record in concept to me. See, I’ve been following the trials and tribulations of one Jack White and his not-that-hot-at-all-but-I’d-probably-do-her-anyway “sister” Meg for a few years now and have become, while not a “big fan,” certainly someone who exhibits a palpable eagerness when it’s time for another Brown-Striped Whites record to be released to the general public. In addition, one of my best friends (The Mythical Al) is obsessed with them and has seen them live and owns like two of their DVD’s. Plus, I’ve lived in either Boston or New York my whole life with semi-annual visits to L.A. to visit The Mythical Al (and now I live in L.A. myself!), and I’ve seen a fair amount of live rock shows, especially the last few years, during which time I’ve seen Radiohead, Interpol, System of a Down, Green Day, etc., as well as being on the verge of seeing such other luminous acts as Tool and Sigur Ros before, you know, shit happened. Thus, you’d figure I’d have seen the White Stripes by now, or at least thought about going to see them, but weirdly I have not. I’m sure they’ve been to Boston or New York in the last, say, three years, but it’s not something I’d have been aware of.

Thus, imagine my surprise when I read Jack White was forming a pseudo-supergroup side project with one “Brendan Benson” and realized I’d seen this man live. Just before I heard this news. In Seattle of all places, in which I’ve spent a grand total of one week of my life. See, I was visiting my good friend and old college roommate Li (to whom I’m sure I’ve referred before, though clearly not as many times as The Mythical Al), who’s living up their doing graduate work at U-Wash. in some kind of new-fangled fancy-schmancy high-tech science-type field they apparently call “Physics.” So we had nothing to do one night and looked up who was playing in some of the cheaper clubs downtown. A certain “Brendan Benson” character was playing at a place Li was familiar with (or maybe he wasn’t; I don’t remember at this point), and upon doing some All Music Guide research on this previously unheard-of musician and his apparent skills at writing hooky, infectious power-pop material, we decided it would be a good idea to see this Brendan Benson fellow. And he was good! Not jaw-droppingly brilliant, and the club was quite small, but very good! Entertaining! Very nice, catchy power-poppy songs! Thumbs-up all around, including the beer selection at whatever this club was. And so Brendon Benson took his place behind the Ichiroll at Safeco Field and the road trip along the coastal “I can see British Columbia over there!” route in a rented PT Cruiser to the Indian Reservation in Neah Bay and the Rock and Roll Experience Museum thingamabob and the drunk homeless dude dancing along to the hilarious Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute band at whatever outdoor concert that was as the 5^th-most memorable experience from my week in Seattle. And that was that! Then like a week later Al all excited tells me about this side project Jack White’s doing with some guy named Brendan Benson. “Oh, I saw him in Seattle with Li like last week! He plays real hooky power-pop! That’ll be a neat combination!” I exclaimed. And that was also that. This is a fantastic story, I know.

So anyway, yes, that is my little personal anecdote about the record on which Jack White and Brendan Benson draft the rhythm section from some band called “The Greenhornes” who I’ve never heard of because I’m not Nick Sylvester, say “THIS IS NOT A SUPERGROUP!”, allow Brendan to rock out a little bit more than he’s used to, and allow Jack to actually work with someone with talent. And if the last two songs were any good at all I’d totally give it an 8 despite its teeny-tiny length and total lack of artistic ambition or effort to make anything more than “a fun lil’ record.” But really, what should we have expected? Jack and Brendan are buddies! Jack has to expend gobs of energy and play every goddamn instrument except drums (which he should probably play too) to make these great, idiosyncratic, diverse albums with his day job, and Brendan keeps releasing these laboriously worked-over, hook-filled power-pop albums (or so I’ve read) that not enough people buy to make him as much of a household name as his good buddy Jack or maybe that rapper guy from Linkin Park (who I totally saw, along with Chester the yelper guy, at LAX this week! Between those two, Dr. 90210, and the Asian guy from Mad TV, I am seeing some crappy celebrities out here, let me tell you). And, um…they’re buddies! And they have a pretty good rhythm section hanging with them, and because of Jack’s name recognition anything they make is gonna get tons of exposure and radio play even if it sucks. So they had some fun and knocked out some retro-sounding, pretty solid rock songs and then played some shows and called it a day.

This thing is certainly worth hearing, but it won’t make anyone forget most of Jack’s White Stripes material. If you’re familiar with the retro, bluesy, feedback-y, sometimes goofy and novelty-y, lo-fi sound of the White Stripes as well as the melodic, interesting power-pop goodness of Brendan’s material (which I’m still just using that one live show as a basis for since I haven’t actually, you know, bought any of his CD’s since), it actually sounds pretty predictable. It either sounds like Jack White playing his usual stuff but backed up by a full band and heavily influenced by more conventionally melodic power-pop or like Brendan Benson being heavily influenced by the rougher guitar sounds, more lo-fi production values, and occasional tomfoolery of the White Stripes (and, ofcourse, either way you’re right). “Steady, As She Goes” is tearing up the airwaves right now, and it sounds like Jack White singing a power-pop song with White Stripes’ guitar tones. Oh, but how melodic! Nice little song there. Not great, but nice (a recurring theme on the album). Dig the intertwining guitar solos, too, which probably sound great live when the two of them are on opposite sides of the stage trading that shit off. And while I’d love to say “the rest of the songs are evenly divided between White Stripes-type heavy blues-rockers and Benson-ish power pop numbers,” that’s simply not the case! One thing I can say for certain about this record is that the two principals really collaborated, and most of the songs have ingredients from both guys’ normal style of music, like the juxtaposition of power-pop melody and lo-fi guitars I mentioned in “Steady, As She Goes,” and while the main melodic part of the ballad “Together” is total pop, the “you gotta learn to live…” sections are total White Stripes. Most of the songs have both guys singing at one point or another, too, so if Jack is singing lead on a song, Brendan will join him for some harmonies later or vice-versa. And the guitar sounds and effects and solos are uniformly really neat. Like the solos in “Level,” which are simply great stuff.

Some songs are a little weirder than others, and these are where I think the album is at its weakest. The spookiness of the title track doesn’t work especially well, the main organ riff in “Store Bought Bones” isn’t the most attractive thing I’ve ever heard, and the slow blues closer “Blue Veins,” outside of Jack’s vocals, is just not a strong song. Boring and uneventful. I can’t remember much of anything about the ballad “Call it a Day,” either, except that I like “Together” a lot more.

Still, though, the weaker tracks are all at least interesting to a degree. This is really quite an enjoyable album. Very fun, light, quick, snappy. All that good stuff. That’s all it is, though, and even the best songs are just “pretty good.” It simply doesn’t reach all that high. Ofcourse, it doesn’t try to, either, and I think a nice, solid 7 is all these guys were really gunning for. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a tossoff (some of the production tricks and ideas are too neat and clever to do such a silly thing), but it’s clear neither Jack nor Brendan put as much effort into this as they normally would into their own albums (again, not that I’d know jack shit about Brendan’s albums, so I’m really just talking out of my ass here). But you know what? It’s a fun, unpretentious little side project, and it’s over in half an hour, so why not? Some good songs here.

Consolers Of The Lonely (2008)

Rating: 8

Best Song: “Carolina Drama”

If I were Meg White, I’d be a little worried. Not that she needs more to worry about right now, considering all the shows she’s missed with “acute anxiety” (By the way, since when can anxiety be “acute?” Isn’t it just “anxiety?” What’s the difference? “Jack, Meg can’t go on.” “What? Why?” “She’s got anxiety.” “So?” “No, you don’t understand…it’s acute anxiety.” “Oh, OK then. In that case, we should probably go ahead and cancel the tour.”), but the fact that Jack went and formed a side project with someone like Brendan Benson (who allows Jack to be “just another guy in the band” sometimes instead of having to do every damn thing himself) in the first place should have alerted everyone to the possibility that, perhaps, Jack was tired of the strait-jacket the White Stripes’ ridiculous self-inflicted instrumental limitations had put on him. The fact that Broken Boy Soldiers sounded like it was written in a week, plus the fact that Jack went right back to Meg and recorded Icky Thump, certainly lowered the alert level from orange to yellow, but there was also the fact that Icky Thump wasn’t really all that great. It sounded like Jack was grasping at straws and trying vainly to “rock out” again, even if this “rocking out” was done at the expense of some of the songs’ being good. Then Meg White develops “acute anxiety” and the Raconteurs announce that they’ll be releasing a new album in a week (I didn’t even know they were recording one!), and it comes out and hey! This certainly wasn’t recorded in a week! This sounds like a really good, interesting, eccentric, varied rock and roll record! I know this may be blasphemous, but…I think…I think I may like it more than Icky Thump!

Actually, Consolers of the Lonely is a lot better than Icky Thump, and the only White Stripes record that I’d say is clearly better than it is Elephant. I may even like it more than Get Behind Me Satan (this of course exposes the inherent flaws in a flat 1-10 rating system, as I sit here trying to rate in order four or five albums I gave 8’s too). And the altogether shocking quality of the record (at least when compared to the good but obviously tossed-off Broken Boy Soldiers; I wouldn’t say that Jack White and Brendan Benson’s combining to produce a really good rock and roll record is in itself “shocking”) isn’t the only reason Meg has reason to be worried. No, see, about a month ago I was sitting at my desk not doing work when The Mythical Al sent me an IM asking me if I want to see the Raconteurs live. I said “sure, I guess, when is it?” He responds: “In 3 days. It’s a secret show. Tickets don’t even go on sale until tomorrow.” I was of course surprised at this development (I didn’t even know they had a new album out, let alone that they were touring to support it…Al was gracious enough to fill me in on the relevant release details), but agreed to go if he could get tickets. He did (for like $20! They played a tiny little club!) and we got there early enough to be like 5 or 10 feet back from the stage. When the band came on, they summarily rocked so fucking hard for a full ninety minutes, limiting the Broken Boy Soldiers material to “Steady, as she Goes,” “Blue Veins” (which got an extended workout during which Jack soloed so maniacally that he knocked over half of Patrick Keeler’s drum kit but kept playing anyway and just left Patrick to make do with a snare, a bass drum, and like 2 cymbals), and a medley of five or six other songs, and clearly armed with the knowledge that their new stuff was better and that they rocked so fucking hard. However, this (i.e. the rocking so fucking hard) is not necessarily the reason Meg should be worried (though, sure, it probably won’t help and may make her anxiety more “acute”). The reason is that the whole “dual frontman” thing the band has working with Jack and Brendan (plus the fact that Jack is, you know, in an actual rock band now) lets Jack have so much fun on stage I was afraid the man would burst half the time. And I dunno, maybe he has that much fun playing with Meg too, but to my eyes it sure looked like a man happy to be liberated from having to take care of 90% of a band’s sound by himself and finally able to just play his guitar parts and not even have to sing half the time. Plus, Patrick Keeler looked pretty fucking ace at the drums back there. The point is that if I were Jack, personal feelings for Meg aside, I’d rather be in the Raconteurs.

This is a good story, I know. Why is the album so good, though? Well, allow me to put on my “amateur wannabe total hack music critic” glasses (which coincidentally contain thick black indie poseur frames like the ones I currently sport in my everyday life) and endeavor to answer this question. Truth is that the album doesn’t start out like it’s gonna be any different from Broken Boy Soldiers. The first two tracks sound suspiciously like regular White Stripes songs with an actual band backing them up, which of course is what half of Broken Boy Soldiers sounds like (the other half consisting of power pop songs (like you’d find on a Brendan Benson album) with heavier guitars (like you’d find on a White Stripes album). The single “Salute Your Solution” (perhaps the worst song on the entire record) in particular shows no development whatsoever from Broken Boy Soldiers or the White Stripes’ entire catalog and thus made me extremely pessimistic about this record before I listened to it. The only noteworthy thing about it is that Brendan sings one of the verses and does his best Jack White impression (i.e. high-pitched, rapid fire, a bit odd, and thoroughly charismatic), but this isn’t enough to save the song from not being interesting.

Track three, though, the lovely piano rock ballad “You Don’t Understand Me,” provides an unexpected surprise. This kind of groovy, melodic, keys-based material wasn’t even in the zip code of Broken Boy Soldiers, and Brendan gives a vocal performance that destroys everything he did on that album, where sometimes it felt like he wasn’t fully comfortable sharing lead duties with Jack. On here, however, he’s just as much a star as Jack, which means the Brendan verse in “Salute Your Solution,” despite coming in a pretty mediocre song, was really the signal for how this record was going to go. This one is a real collaboration, you see, and you can’t look at most of these songs and go “oh, that’s a Jack song” or “oh, that’s a Brendan song,” if only because the palette of the band (which consists entirely of seventies rock tributes and rip-offs, and I’m not so obtuse that I don’t know this, but the songs are generally so good that I don’t mind at all) has expanded to the point that three quarters of this stuff could never have been on Broken Boy Soldiers. A number of songs could plausibly be described as “epic,” including the swaggering Wild West tale “The Switch and the Spur” and the alternately pulsating and liltingly bluesy “Many Shades of Black,” which are two of the best songs here and (like “You Don’t Understand Me”) are both sung by Brendan. Hell, with one exception, I actually think Brendan clearly sounds better than Jack on this album. The way he hits the notes is so Jack-like that sometimes I can barely tell them apart, but Brendan’s voice has more melody and just as much charisma, if less willful eccentricity. His more traditional vox gets placed center-stage on these more epic-sounding songs because it fits them better, and Jack’s contribution to “Many Shades of Black” is limited mainly to an incredibly odd squealing guitar solo that almost sounds like something Tom Morello would produce.

The material on here is neat in all sorts of interesting ways, from the boogie of “Old Enough” to the country slide guitar of “Top Yourself” to the eccentric flat-out rock of “Hold Up.” Interesting horn lines and keyboard tones and frigged out guitar solos abound, sometimes in the same song, many of which have the unmistakable air of “hey, fuck it, let’s try this!” Not everything hits, of course (some of the shorter songs toward the end are pretty unmemorable, and the few times there are obvious “Jack songs” don’t end up too much better than “Salute Your Solution”), but the last part of the album does produce two more classics, the superb cover of “Rich Kid Blues” (again sung by Brendan) and the country campfire epic “Carolina Drama,” which closes off an album in which the best moments belong to Brendan with a song to top them all…which of course belongs to Jack. Ha.

So Jack is in a band where he doesn’t have to do everything that (currently) is producing better music than the White Stripes. Whether this means that Meg really should be worried I don’t know, but at the very least it’s clear that you can’t call the Raconteurs a “side project” anymore. They’re a very good, interesting, eccentric, seventies-leaning rock and roll band with two very talented frontmen. They also gave me one of the more face-melting live experiences I’ve had recently (considering the tickets were so cheap and I was standing so close, it may have been the best “bang for the buck” concert I’ve ever been to, actually). Even if their bassist looks like a teenage girl, these guys are something to be reckoned with now. No wonder Meg has so much anxiety.

Can we call it a day?