Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 03/25/2008
Anybody who has followed
Jack White's online screeds and offstage brawls knows that
the White Stripes' mastermind can tend to get a little, well, defensive when he's challenged (and sometimes even when he's not), but this trait hasn't always surfaced on record -- at least not in the way he and his merry band of
Raconteurs do on their second album,
Consolers of the Lonely. At the very least, this bubbling blend of bizarro
blues, rustic
progressive rock, fractured
pop, and bludgeoning guitars is a finger in the eye to anyone who dared call the band a mere
power pop trifle, proof that
the Raconteurs are a
rock & roll band, but it's not just the sound of the record that's defiant. There's the very nature of the album's release: how it was announced to the world a week before its release when it then appeared in all formats in all retail outfits simultaneously; there's the obstinately olde-fashioned look of the art work, how the group is decked out like minstrels at a turn-of-the century carnival, or at least out of
Dylan's
Masked and Anonymous. Most of all, there's the overriding sense that
the Raconteurs are turning into an outlet for every passing fancy that
Jack has but will not allow himself to indulge within the confines of the tightly controlled
White Stripes, whether it's melodramatic Western operas like
"The Switch and the Spur" (whose concluding bridge states "any poor souls who trespass against us...will be suffer the bite or be stung dead on sight", functioning as a virtual manifesto for the band), or the slick studio trickery that makes this the biggest
White-related production yet. And it's hard to shake the feeling that this is the show of
Jack White III (as he now insists on billing himself, playing right into his ongoing
Third Man fetish), as that despite the even split in songwriting and producing credits between
Jack and
Brendan Benson, and even how they trade off lead vocals, that only
White could have pushed
the Raconteurs to get as stubbornly, stiffly weird as they do here. Of course, that impression is not tempered by how
Brendan mimics
Jack's manic
blues babble, particularly on the spitfire
"Salute Your Solution" --
White does follow
Benson's gentle, rounded phrasing on the elongated melodies, but that's a subtle distinction overpowered by the force of
Jack's concepts. And this is indeed "concepts" in plural: how cult hero
Terry Reid is used as a touchstone for the band's
progressive blues-rock via a blazing cover of
"Rich Kid Blues," or how there's an evocation of the old weird America in all the album's rambling centerpieces, or how half of the record fights against
pop brevity, while all of it is a deathblow against the idea that
the Raconteurs are
power pop sissies. Sometimes, the group hits against that notion with a bluesy bluster, especially on the opening pair of tunes which tread a bit too closely toward
Jack conventions, sometimes their attempts to stretch out are either ill-defined (
"Attention," "You Don't Understand Me") or collapse under their own weight (
"Many Shades of Black"), but the moments that do work -- and there are many -- make for the best music
the Raconteurs have yet made. The album truly kicks into gear with the tipsy
country stomp of
"Old Enough" and after that, there's a series of remarkable moments: that absurd
Morricone dust-up
"The Switch and the Spur";
"Hold Up," which rages like '70s
Stones at their sleaziest; the rampaging
"Five on the Five"; that splendid
Reid cover that finds its heir on the steadily building
"These Stones Will Shout," and finally, the closing backwoods ballad on
"Carolina Drama." These songs illustrate all the ways that
Jack White's stubborn stylization pays off -- they're quite deliberate in their conflation of the traditional and modern, yet they never sound over-thought, they kick and crackle as pure kinetic music.
Broken Boy Soldiers lacked tunes like these, tunes with considerable weight, and these songs turn
Consolers of the Lonely into a lop-sided, bottom-loaded album that's better and richer than their debut.
~Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
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