The Raconteurs – Consolers of the Lonely (2008)

The first Raconteurs album was an interesting experiment combining Jack White's rough garage rock sounds with melodic songwriting of Brendan Benson. Back when it came out, I thought it would just be a one-off project, but I was proofed wrong when The Raconteurs released this second album of theirs a couple of years later. The band didn't market their album in advance in any way, so it was largely a surprise to everyone when it came out. Consolers of the Lonely continues the super-band's career with quite similar sounds to the first album, although this is maybe slightly noisier than Broken Toy Soldiers was. It's more clear where the influences are with this album. I'm sure they've listened to their fair share of Led Zeppelin and The Who before making this album. There are excellent songs on this album, but it didn't raise same kind of excitement as the first album.



I feel like the dynamic is similar to the first album in a sense that Jack White sings the most clearly Brendan Benson's compositions and Benson sings White's compositions. This is an interesting dynamic, and makes the album sound different from White Stripes or Brendan Benson.

There are many great songs on the album, but for some reason, this album never really made a huge impression on me. It's nice to listen to and some of the songs even make me sing along, but I don't really find that many moments in my life when I would specifically choose to listen to this album. Somehow the overall collection of songs is a bit boring.

The album starts with a very typical Jack White song Consolers of the Lonely, where the rhythm takes the main stage while the melody is very minimalistic. There's nice interplay between White's and Benson's vocals in this song. The rhythms change accordingly. Salute your Solution is very similar to some old The Who tracks like My Generation. It's loud, fast and filled with rock n' roll attitude. The sounds are very retro, but I really like the bass lines. You Don't Understand Me is a very typical Brendan Benson song with bouncy rhythms and catchy melodies. Old Enough changes the mood of the record. This song is a folky blues rock song with heavy Americana influences. I really like the folk fiddles in the song. The Switch and the Spur has excellent Southern style trumpets and changing rhythms. I could see this song being used in a Quentin Tarantino film. The song changes completely about half-way, the marching style ending is really good. Hold Up has very heavy garage sounds and some interesting electric guitar work. It reminds me of Led Zeppelin quite a bit. Top Yourself is like a track from Zeppelin's third album. The steely guitar sounds along with the banjo and a rhythmic blues rock beats make this song sound really retro. Many Shades of Black is my favourite song on the album. There are some great trumpets and a fantastic bluesy melody. Five on the Five is the noisiest song on the album. It's not that interesting as a composition, but the attitude is through the roof. This song would've probably been excellent to jump to live. The rest of the album follows similar kinds of patterns and I feel like there's nothing really that interesting on the album after this point, except the last song Carolina Drama, which is a great Americana storytelling song in the style of Bob Dylan, but with amazing White vocals and heavier guitars.

I already mentioned Quentin Tarantino earlier in this post. I think the music video for Old Enough, looks like it could be from one of his lost westerns. The band is playing in a forest in mock-Victorian period clothing. Each of the band members has been copied twice so it looks like there are three Brendan Bensons singing in three different angles.

I think The Raconteurs was a really great thing as a concept, but I feel like both Jack White and Brendan Benson were able to make slightly better sounding songs on their own respective albums. There's great playfulness on this album though. That's what you can expect from an album that was recorded in just a couple of weeks and released very soon afterwards without any kind of proper promotion.

Listen to the album on Spotify.