No strangers: The Raconteurs, Lead Album,
Steady as he blows… The Raconteurs return with their first album in over 10 years. Can Jack White still cut it as a team player?
“The record celebrates the joy of making loud rock music together.”
The Raconteurs ★★★★ Help Us Stranger THIRD MAN. CD/DL/LP
IN EARLY 2000, inspired by raw blues, minimalist art and the financial exigencies of being an unknown indie rock musician, Jack White composed a manifesto for the second White Stripes album, De Stijl. “When it’s hard to break the rules of excess, then new rules need to be established.”
While some of his less temperate outbursts suggest otherwise, White has remained a stickler for that self-discipline over much of the ensuing two decades. From the moment he and Meg White chose a wardrobe of red and white and the most basic of set-ups, he defined himself by constriction. “The whole point of The White Stripes is the liberation of limiting yourself,” he told David Fricke in 2005. “In my opinion, too much opportunity kills creativity.”
By 2018’s Boarding House Reach, the limits had been reconfigured. White wrote songs at a rented Nashville apartment, and recorded in New York and LA in three-day bursts: “Places I’d never recorded before and with musicians I’d never worked with before,” he told MOJO. “I did find new ways to put myself in uncomfortable positions.” Where once there were difficulties born of economy, challenge had become a luxury imperative.
The Raconteurs, though, are an exception in White’s fastidiously coordinated universe. Their colour-coding is slack, their operational parameters unusually permeable. Unlike the fraught dialogue between art project and abandon that characterises many of White’s endeavours, the quartet present themselves in an amiable, comradely way – confoundingly like a normal band. The second song on this third Raconteurs set is a Sympathy For The Devil-style boogaloo called Help Me Stranger, but for the album title, the personal pronoun is scrupulously pluralised: Help Us Stranger. White, Brendan Benson, Patrick Keeler and Jack Lawrence are all, pointedly, in this together.
Is democracy, or what looks like democracy, the most daunting restriction of all? This, perhaps, is the challenge, that White sets himself as he reconvenes The Raconteurs for the first time in a decade: whether such a protean creative can still flourish as part of a team.
Help Us Stranger certainly implies as much. After the frantic, solipsistic oddness of Boarding House Reach, The Raconteurs offer a much more straightforward and enjoyable 42 minutes. As with 2006’s Broken Boy Soldiers and 2008’s Consolers Of The Lonely, the songwriting is shared (the 11 original songs are all listed as co-writes) with Benson, a powerpop artisan possessed of a gentler and more conventional melodic sensibility, yin to White’s jagged, provocative yang.
There is, once again, a degree of trying on each other’s clothes. Live A Lie, a garage rock trinket that sits somewhere on the scuzz continuum between The Stooges and the New York Dolls, is sung by a plainly energised Benson. But while Broken Boy Soldiers found White and Benson morphing into one another, eliding their voices to optimise confusion, Help Us Stranger feels more like a harmonious clash between distinct aesthetics. It begins with 34 seconds of jazzy choogle, as if the quartet were toying with the Grateful Dead’s China Cat Sunflower, before a sequence of powerchords herald Bored And Razed, and The Raconteurs’ superb drummer Keeler ups the pace to martial glam. White is first to the mike, spitting out lines with familiar staccato fury, leaving Benson to make amends with the melody in the chorus. It appears to be a conflicted love song to the pair’s old hometown of Detroit, but the sound is indebted to Cheap Trick; a blend of harmony and heaviness that runs through much of Help Us Stranger.
Two songs, Don’t Bother Me – a hysterically operatic foray towards heavy metal – and What’s Yours Is Mine – brokeback Funkadelica, loosely – aren’t a million miles from Boarding House Reach, with White’s flow still channelling the ejaculations of rap. But it transpires the actual holdover from those sessions is Shine The Light On Me, a tremendously florid, charged piano ballad in the vein of Blunderbuss and Would You Fight For My Love?
On a record that celebrates four-way groupthink and the elevated joy of making loud rock music together, it’s a little ironic that the ballads, in fact, turn out to be highlights. White’s default setting remains indignation, but Benson’s is increasingly one of mature regret. So Somedays (I Don’t Feel Like Trying) is a beautifully direct lyric about depression, pitched halfway between All Things Must Pass and Harvest, in which the band’s muscular empathy inspires the singer from his torpor. Now That You’re Gone, meanwhile, is a sequel of sorts to Many Shades Of Black, from Consolers Of The Lonely: an update of the most imploring soul melodramas, with White’s squiggly guitar fills providing radical punctuation to Benson’s emoting. It’s the sound of White chafing at the boundaries of band etiquette, grappling for the spotlight once again in a way that Benson never seems to do on White-led tracks. But the tension works to the benefit of Benson’s song, rather than undermining it.
White’s own epiphany comes with the final track, Thoughts And Prayers. One of his best songs in years, it revisits his old Led Zeppelin obsession, with Bron-Yr-Aur fingerpicking, Robert Plant’s stage whisper, the jet plane drone of Whole Lotta Love and, most notably, the mystical delicacy of Thank You. If anything, Thoughts And Prayers is more like a latter-day Plant version of Thank You, the action tilting towards Appalachia and the instrumental fireworks coming from Lillie Mae Rische’s rearing fiddle rather than White’s acoustic guitar. For a song that closes an album predicated on musical friendship, its tone is strangely bereft: “I used to give my friends a call,” White laments. “Now there’s no one left at all.”
Benson could have surreptitiously written the lines, but it’s hard not to read them as evidence of a power struggle at the heart of The Raconteurs – not between White and his bandmates, but between the duelling identities of White himself. Raconteur or solo auteur? This year, the former is in the ascendant. How long the entente will last, though, is part of the spectacle of White’s ongoing adventure: formally constrained and exhilaratingly unpredictable at every step.