Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 15/05/06
Label: Third Man / XL

In an industry that's no stranger to the shamelessly self-congratulatory and the crassly commercial, there are still few concepts more ghastly than the supergroup. Of course, such musical amalgamations may be sublime (e.g. Free Kitten, The Reindeer Section) as well as ridiculous (Power Station, The Traveling Wilburies), but whatever their players' provenance, the whiff of self-regard tends to hang around them like a bad smell.

If anyone can get away with chumming up with his mates outside of his day job, however, it's the no-nonsense Jack White. Together with singer-songwriter Brendan Benson and the rhythm section of Cincinnati's retro garage rockers The Greenhornes, the champion of rigidly prescribed, brutally minimalist blues has decided to let it all hang out with The Raconteurs. As he said recently, "The White Stripes is obeying the rules and this, for me, is breaking all the rules." On the evidence of "Broken Boy Soldiers", the newfound freedom suits him brilliantly.

Despite his necessarily dominant profile, The Raconteurs are most certainly not White's vehicle alone. After all, Benson has been holding down his own career for the past decade, via three albums' worth of impassioned power pop, while the drummer and bass player also have their own solid band. Crucially, they've all worked with one another before, which is why this 10-track debut plays so confidently as an ensemble piece. As you might expect from such strongly authorial voices, White's and Benson's individual handiwork can be detected, but there's a natural democracy at work here.

This sees them mixing and matching their styles (White's gnarly and textured, Benson's sweeter and more conventionally structured) and makes for an impressively rounded, engagingly inventive record that ranges across British blues / R&B, Mod pop, psychedelia and American country rock. Lead single "Steady, As She Goes" opens, its dramatically clipped, central guitar motif offset with joyously abandoned surges of melody.

"Hands" - with that dreamy, Byrds-ish fuzz anchored by clamorous power chords - is surely Benson's work, as are the Small Faces-toned "Intimate Secretary" and "Yellow Sun" and "Together" (imagine The Lemonheads covering The Eagles' "Desperado"), where his and White's voices chime in terrific harmony. By contrast, the title track's galloping urgency suggests that White's copy of "Led Zeppelin IV" is still to hand and both the crazed riffery that pumps through "Store Bought Bones" and the soulful, Southern blues-rock of closer "Blue Veins" bear his mark.

The twitcher that lurks inside every listener, however, may well be frustrated by "Broken Boy Soldiers", as it's so very much more than the sum of its celebrity parts. It represents the spirited, agenda-free, genuinely collaborative supergroup - these days, a rare animal indeed.

    by Sharon O'Connell