Raconteurs

Somewhere between the giddy, manic weirdness of 2005’s “Get Behind Me Satan” and the gut-busting wheeze of last year’s “Icky Thump,” White Stripes’ prime mover Jack White decided to take a break from his own expectations and tried to satisfy some of his fans’. Of course, the perennial question on the minds of every new-blues neophyte grooving to the likes of “Fell in Love with a Girl” or “Ball and Biscuit” went something like this: what would this guy sound like in front of a full band? The curiosity seems to have even proven too much for White, and in 2005 he formed the Raconteurs alongside Detroit singer-songwriter Brendan Benson and the rhythm section from Cincinnati garage trio the Greenhornes. “Broken Boy Soldiers,” their 2006 debut, was pretty much what you’d expect: simple riffs and a few catchy hooks punched up by White’s flare for bombast and the duo’s effusive excitement at the novelty of it all. Not exactly inspired, but not quite MOR either—the kind of one-off experiment meant to whet appetites in anticipation of the main vehicle.

That being said, it’s difficult to understand why the Raconteurs have returned in 2008. Their follow-up, “Consolers of the Lonely,” masquerades as a more commercially and critically viable incarnation of their debut. Instead, this second outing feels like a regression from the first, and the band’s overall competency seems to be the only weapon against an inevitable fade into pop-rock homogeny.

From the opening chords of the title track, it becomes apparent that something is amiss on “Consolers of the Lonely.” Nearly every song on the album seems to obey a sort of invisible rock template, a self-conscious mechanism that mindlessly plugs in choruses, verses, hooks and solos, but never seems to be aware of what makes any of those things work together. The album plods along on autopilot for six straight tracks of virtually indistinguishable twin-guitar artillery, with doses of horn flourish applied intermittently in a futile attempt to enliven the record’s blandness. “The Switch and the Spur,” “Hold Up,” and “Top Yourself” all feel like second-rate Stripes songs, and Benson’s vocal and instrumental contributions to each are inoffensive at best and crippling at worst. The lyrics yawn, their pasteboard depth most evident on the utterly directionless “You Don’t Understand Me” (“And there’s always another point of view, / A better way to do the things we do, / And how can you know me and I know you, / If nothing is true?”). Boredom only serves as the first shock wave at the realization that these words are being sung by the same man who penned the Dylanesque “There’s No Home for You Here.” And there’s really no good explanation here, either. None of the musicians involved have any obligatory relationship with the band and, furthermore, if this were merely a phoned-in affair, why the excess of material? At a disorienting fifty-five minutes, it’s nearly twice the length of the band’s debut, and longer than any Stripes album to date.

There are redemptive exceptions here that save “Consolers of the Lonely” from true failure. “These Stones Will Shout” makes a successful transition from airy, melodic folk song to righteous stadium-rock workout, enough to get the heart racing leading up to the strangely hypnotic blues-ballad “Carolina Drama.” “Salute Your Solution,” the album’s first single, is a chunky, supercharged freefall that takes full advantage of the quartet format, fully fleshing out the bass and keyboards in a way that the rest of the album lacks. “Five on the Five”—easily the album’s best track—stabs wildly with a soaring chorus that stomps feet and pumps fists into fuzzy bliss. Benson’s only solid performance is “Five’s” smoothed-out cousin, “Attention,” that burns on verses of pure, exhilarating power chords, chopped up with the kind of funky breakdowns that are missing from the rest of the album. “Rich Kid Blues” builds steadily, even brilliantly, into a jam-session explosion where, for once, White’s acrobatics are given their due floor space.

But with these gems composing a small portion of the entire album, there is little more to “Consolers of the Lonely” than disappointment. With this staggering amount of material and a reinvested focus on the project, it’s easy to see the Raconteurs eating up more and more of White’s time. “Consolers of the Lonely,” however, speaks to the painfully short half-life of side-projects at large, and sacrificing a White Stripes effort to another Raconteurs album would be a major miscalculation.

—Ryan J. Meehan can be reached at meehan@fas.harvard.edu