The Raconteurs

Rarely has such a modest little record arrived under such a mountain of hype. With ten punchy tracks weighing in at just over half an hour's worth of music, The Raconteurs' Broken Boy Soldiers seems carefully packaged to downplay the fact one-half of the songwriting duo behind it is Jack White, the man whose incandescent talent has made The White Stripes one of the most fascinating bands to watch over the past decade. The other half of the Raconteurs' songwriting core, Brendan Benson, is no slouch either -- as a solo artist, he's made three acclaimed albums' worth of charming (albeit lightweight) power pop. And if you're a fan of this sort of retro-flavored indie rock, the Raconteurs' rhythm section practically makes this a supergroup -- bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler are moonlighting from an excellent band called The Greenhornes, whom Jack White handpicked to open for him on the White Stripes' last tour.

The common ground between all these talents seems to be a love of '60s-era psychedelic pop-rock, and at its best, Broken Boy Soldiers sounds like a dream-team collaboration between Lennon/McCartney, Eric Burdon and Donovan -- all fuzzy guitar hooks, reverb-laden keyboards, quirky/catchy melodies, and corny studio tricks like backwards tape loops and harmonizing vocals shoved way into the left and right channels for maximum stereophonic impact. In terms of pure retro-rock geek appeal, every minute of every track is wonderful, even if the songs themselves don't always hold up.

The songs that do hold up tend to be the ones that strike the right balance between White's fiery, blues-rock style and Benson's lighter, poppier approach. "Intimate Secretary," for example, is a simple slab of fuzz-pedal riff-rock that stands out thanks to the interplay of White's impassionated delivery of his unintelligibly literate lyrics (who else drops words like "kakistocracy" into a song?) with Benson's more detached vocals and unabashedly goofy lyrics ("I've got a rabbit that likes to hop/I've got a girlfriend who likes to shop"). Most of Broken Boy Soldiers works well thanks to the frisson between these complementary but very different performers -- only when the Raconteurs obviously try to shoehorn White into a Benson song (as on the plodding "Together," with its tacked-on call-and-response vocals from White) or vice versa does the recipe turn out bland results.

Hardcore White Stripes followers might be disappointed by how much this is truly a collaborative project -- only the title song and the weird, bluesy closer, "Blue Veins," give Jack White center stage for an entire track -- but for the rest of us, Broken Boy Soldiers stands alongside Loretta Lynn's Van Lear Rose as further proof that Jack White can apparently do anything. As for Benson, fans who noticed a dropoff in the quality of his work after he parted ways with his old songwriting partner Jason Falkner will be delighted at how reinvigorated he sounds on tracks like "Hands" and "Yellow Sun." Sharing the room with another -- some might say better -- songwriter seems to do wonders for his creative juices. All in all, deliberately modest though it may be, Broken Boy Soldiers is one of the more entertaining rock records so far this year. -- Andy Hermann

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, All Music Guide