reax music magazine :: music + culture » Reviews » The Raconteurs - Consolers Of The Lonely

On the track “Hold On” of The Raconteurs sophomore LP, Jack White sings—rather, he screams—“I’ve had enough of these modern times, going to drive me out of my mind, and you know this too well, I’m holed up in my little cell.”  And in this anachronistic cell (surrounded by a mountain of a vinyl, I assume) White once again starts off on one genre as a home base to explore—or, rather recycle—other genres.  With the White Stripes he used garage rock to reformulate blues, folk, rockabilly, country, and rhythm and blues.  Now, with The Raconteurs, and a full repertoire of musicians at his disposal, the Rag and bone man uses 70’s psychedelic rock to ape Nazareth, Black Sabbath, MC5, KISS, Aerosmith, Parliament Funkadelic, Yes, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer (especially the organs).  While it is hard to pin down on Consolers that one summer hit like “Steady As She Goes,” there are burners that exceed the Broken Boy Soldier highlights, piling up with “Salute Your Solution” (a Bush metaphor in the vein of Icky Thump’s “Cause and Effect”), the aforementioned “Hold Up,” and “Attention.”  With his vocal, and more harmonious, twin Brendan Benson, the group is a much more comfortable, intuitive unit this time out.  They’ve obviously continued to write music together since Broken Boy’s release, evident with “Five On The Five,” a track first introduced on tour back in 2006.  The gamut is a lot wider here, albeit with a narrow window, riding the razor’s edge between psychedelic blues and prog rock, which admittedly can be jarring for some.  But, the range they pull with “These Stones Will Shout,” beginning with a Bron-Y-Aur Stomp accoustic collective, Jack Lawrence’s bass punching up the lows, Patrick Keeler kicking down the folk curtain, and then Jack finishing it off in a galactic cascade of guitar riffs is a pure clinic on band dynamics; everyone allowed a chance to shine without a gratuitous part in sight.  Never one to embrace mp3’s, or as he condescendingly refers to as “invisible music,” Jack’s always been the time travelling rockstar, never turning the dial past 1976.  Yet with all his simpleton declarations, The Raconteurs reveal he is a true gearhead at heart, honoring the guitar gods who ruled upon high from their arena temples.  In the end, you can spend all day playing “Memory,” matching the song with its influence, showing off your extensive knowledge of pop history, or you can just sit back in your 1972 Valiant Charger and bop one’s head to a masterful piece of American rock.  Me? I’ll take The Raconteurs and a hemi any day.