The Raconteurs
Consolers Of The Lonely
***
Breakneck second album from Jack White’s other band.

As befits an album whose existence was only announced seven days ago, everything about Consolers Of The Lonely suggests speed and urgency. Mixed and mastered in the first week of March, in the shops by 25 March, The Raconteurs’s second album opens with the sound of convivial studio chatter and a mumbled instruction – “We’ll double-track that” – as if Jack White and Brendan Benson’s crew were in such a rush to release it they didn’t even have time to delete the out-takes.

That sense of pace never really lets up on an album that sees White, liberated from the primal blues-heft of The White Stripes, revelling in the chance to expand his sonic palette. That was true of The Raconteurs’ 2006 debut, of course, but here the sense of free-wheeling experimentation is more intense. There’s no “big single” in the Steady As She Goes mould – the closest we get to that is the hectic, doo-wop-meets-mariachi scrawl of Many Shades Of Black – but it’s a richer, more exhilarating listen than Broken Boy Soldiers. Overall, the impression is of a man (and this an album dominated by Jack White’s singular vision) over-burdened with creativity, bursting with ideas and tripping over himself in his eagerness to get them all out. That some level of coherence – and certainly much sense of human warmth - gets lost in the sonic melee is, perhaps, inevitable.

Consolers Of The Lonely is an album with a severe case of ADD, a dizzying whirlpool of garish juxtapositions in which no riff or rhythm is ever allowed to settle for more than a few seconds. Fiddle-driven trad-folk interspersed with zappy, Deep Purple-style Hammond organ wig-outs? That’ll be Old Enough. Piano whimsy jammed up alongside stacked, ELO-style harmonies? You’ll find such a whiplash-inducing mix on You Don’t Understand Me. There’s also a brace of songs, The Switch And The Spur and Many Shades Of Black, that are best described as Hispanic prog rock. Both take the galloping, Don Quixote-meets-Led Zep vistas explored on The White Stripes’ Conquest, and pump them full of testosterone and guitar-flash, pushing the needle even further into the red.

Guitar solos are everywhere on this album, spurting out in crazy and unexpected directions like the lines on a Jackson Pollock painting. Ironically, for someone who specialises in such basic, route-one riffs, Jack White is blossoming into one of rock’s most instantly recognisable guitarists, blessed with the uncanny ability to make his solos – especially those high, brittle ones – sound like electricity crackling between pylons.

There is a further irony, namely that someone famed for his ideological attachment to lo-fi, retro recording techniques, should have produced an album that is essentially an extended love letter to the inexhaustible possibilities of the recording studio. As final track Carolina Drama hurtles to its mad, mandolin-driven climax, you’re left with the mental image of an over-heating mixing desk, smoke pouring from the faders – as well as the notion of a man who clearly needs two bands to soak up the overspill from his over-active creativity.

Careering through genres with virtuosic abandon, while never quite providing a glimpse of the inner lives behind it, Consolers Of The Lonely is a difficult album to truly love, but it's one that’s impossible not to admire.
LUKE LEWIS