With his Detroit-blues style now so accepted/sanitized (delete as appropriate…) that it has been deemed fit for a new Coke advert, Jack White (of The Stripes) has looked beyond the candy-cane colour scheme for some back-to-basics rock action – forming The Raconteurs alongside Brendan Benson, Patrick Keeler and Jack Lawrence. Placing the band's genesis firmly at the feet of opening track ‘Steady As She Goes’, The Raconteurs formed after chief protagonists White and Benson wrote the song in a sweaty attic and, sensing the light caress of destiny, decided to form a proper rock combo with which to unleash the sonic beast. The result? Broken Boy Soldiers. Undoubtedly wrought from the same ground which birthed The White Stripes, The Raconteurs nonetheless differ significantly from the marital/sibling duo, ranging at times closer to The Vines than ‘Hotel Yorba’ and in doing so present a sound that is immediately accessible without sacrificing depth. Opening with the aforementioned ‘Steady As She Goes’, The Raconteurs brazenly serve up a brace of FM-fed flavour that sees an encroaching crunch of guitars being held at bay by White's unreasonably catchy vocal (“Find yourself a girl, and settle down / Live a simple life in a quiet town / Steady, as she goes …”) – with the added layers of bass merely adding to it's nutritional value. As far as guitar-pop goes, ‘Steady As She Goes’ represents a pretty virulent strain. From here in Broken Boy Soldiers has a pretty high hit-rate (even if it struggles to match the opening salvo), with ‘Yellow Sun’ nicking a hook from ‘Rainbow’ and pressing it into George Harrison-esque acoustic action, ‘Call It A Day’ firmly makes it's Benson genealogy clear with an alt.disposition, whilst ‘Intimate Secretary’ is a riff graunching journey through Glam/Britpop border regions. Closing with the drafty tape-EFX of ‘Blue Veins’, the Raconteurs have delivered an album that may not be heavy on innovation, but more than makes up for this with a potent vial of habit-forming goodness. If it ain't broke…
Review:
It's hard to call the Raconteurs a genuine supergroup since there's only
one true rock star in the quartet: the White Stripes' eccentric mastermind Jack
White. Sometime between the recording of the Stripes' 2003 breakthrough
Elephant and its willfully difficult 2005 follow-up, Get Behind Me Satan, White
teamed up with fellow Detroit singer/songwriter Brendan Benson to write some
tunes, eventually drafting the rhythm section of Cincinnati garage rockers the
Greenhornes as support. Lasting just ten tracks, their debut, Broken Boy
Soldiers, doesn't feel hasty, but it doesn't exactly feel carefully considered,
either. It sounds exactly as what it is: a busman's holiday for two
prodigiously gifted pop songwriters where they get to indulge in temptations
that their regular gig doesn't afford. For Benson, he gets to rock harder than
he does on his meticulously crafted solo albums; for White, he gets to shed the
self-imposed restrictions of the White Stripes and delve into the psychedelic
art pop he's hinted at on Elephant and Satan. Both Benson and White are
indebted to ‘60s guitar pop, particularly the pop experiments of the
mid-’60s – in its deliberately dark blues-rock, Elephant resembled a
modern-day variation of the Stones' Aftermath, while Benson has drawn deeply
from Rubber Soul and Revolver, not to mention the Kinks or any number of other
'60s pop acts – so they make good, even natural, collaborators, with
Brendan's classicist tendencies nicely balancing Jack's gleeful freak-outs.
Appropriately, Broken Boy Soldiers does sound like the work of a band, with
traded lead vocals and layers of harmonies, and no deliberate emphasis on one
singer over the other. Even if there's a seemingly conscious effort to give
Brendan Benson and Jack White equal space on this brief album, White can't help
but overshadow his partner: as good as Benson is, White's a far more dynamic,
innovative, and compelling presence – there's a reason why he's a star. But
he does willingly embrace the teamwork of a band here, dressing up
Benson's songs with weird flourishes, and playing some great guitar along the
way. If the Raconteurs don't rock nearly as hard as the White Stripes –
there's a reckless freedom in Jack's careening performances when
he's supported only by Meg White – they do have some subtle sonic textures
that the Stripes lack, and a tougher backbone than Benson's albums, which makes
them their own distinctive entity. And they're a band that has their own
identity – it may be somewhat stuck in the '60s, but they're not
monochromatic, showcasing instead a variety of sounds, ranging from sparely
ominous single “Steady, as She Goes” and the propulsive pop of “Hands”
to the churning Eastern psychedelia of “Intimate Secretary” and the
grandiose menace of the title track to the slow blues burn of “Blue Veins.”
These songs, and the five other cuts on this album, prove that the Raconteurs
are nothing less than a first-rate power pop band – but they're nothing more,
either. They may not rewrite the rules of pop on Broken Boy Soldiers, but they
don't try to: they simply lie back and deliver ten good, colorful pop songs, so
classic in style and concise in form that the album itself is barely over in
30 minutes. It's brief and even a little slight, but it's almost as much fun
to listen to as it must have been to make.
Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AllMusic.com