You can picture him can’t you – lounging in his lair, stroking the white Persian cat with dyed red streaks on his lap, perusing his tour returns and royalty cheques from within the depths of his walk-in red, black and white wardrobe, and laughing. Laughing out a big old hearty evil nemesis laugh, through his big crooked moustachioed face.
Remember, as we ploughed into the brave new world of an uncharted millennium Jack White made our new obsession an elementary 2-piece colour-coded rock ‘n’ roll band with a technology allergy, reinventing records much older than most of his audience and making the talk of the town whether or not it was his divorced wife or his cute sister banging the skins for him. Good old fashioned quality gossip, y’know. Only either that wasn’t enough for him or it was only the beginning. You would have thought that The White Stripes offered every opportunity for any indulgence he may have craved, their flighty ram-raiding of decades of rock didn’t exactly narrow their scope. But he is an old-school sort of chap we suppose, and there are some things you’re only meant to do with the boys. Enter, The Raconteurs.
One of these things would be rough-as-a-tramp’s-gusset 70s rock. Spelt with a ‘w’. Right, girls? And this might not be the record many people expected, or wanted. ‘Steady, As She Goes’, the band’s raucous, insistent debut single and opening track, isn’t exactly misleading, but it is a tiny bit dishonest. It’s essentially ‘7 Nation Army’ with a good deal more roughage; there is a thick, hypnotic bassline, sharp beats and heavy-handed melodies crashing into one another and it is impossible to ignore. It’s a good introduction to this band’s work, but behind it lies an altogether less filtered clutch of chest-beating indulgence and minority-interest riffage. And while there are few of us that can knock a bit of Thin Lizzy or even Lynard Skynard when they come on the pub jukebox, such a dense, narrowly and faithfully focussed homage seems a little beyond the palette of the mainstream Dastardly Emperor White is aiming at conquering.
But anyway, there are more people in this band, most notably Detroit middle-distance singer-songwriter Brendan Benson. While few would consider him a heavyweight it’s still disappointing to find that the record is more fantasy role-play than collaborative venture between his and White’s best bits – though there is some evidence of that on the lilting Hammond ballad ‘Together’. But the more you live with the album, the combined stature of the two lead men (or the leader and his henchman) does begin to reveal itself. There’s a warm muscularity to the songwriting on display, even through the musty treble-drained stench of the riffs excavated from rock’s graveyard. And before you know it it’s taking more than a squawking testosterone divining-rod of a solo to turn you away from these songs.
And there are at least a couple more singles left on here. The psychedelic Who-esque ‘Intimate Secretary’ with Jack’s magnetic caterwauling lifting out of the melodic dirge of the verse for one, the Led Zepp shape throwing of the title track for another and then to put the album to bed ‘Blue Veins’ is a delectably blue soul song that you hardly need suspend your disbelief to imagine Robert Plant tearing to pieces. But then he probably knew we’d come around eventually, it’s all part of his plan. The question is, what next? And what of Meg?