KEY POINTS:
THE RACONTEURS
Consolers of the Lonely
(XL)
Herald Rating: * * * *
Verdict: White Stripes main man's other band delivers exciting second helping of retro-rifferama
That Jack White fella sure is putting himself about a bit. There he is on the cover of Rolling Stone with the Rolling Stones due to his guest slot in concert movie Shine a Light.
There he was playing Elvis in rock bio parody Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
There was that White Stripes album last year and now here's the second album, after 2006's Broken Boy Soldiers, from his other, less colour-co-ordinated, more rhythmically-gifted band, the Raconteurs.
And while on the debut he submerged himself into the Raconteurs' twin-frontman line-up with Brendan Benson, here he's utterly prominent.
That makes Consolers closer to Stripes territory than the 70s sideroads they explored on Soldiers.
And one of the chief pleasures of this often-incendiary collection is guessing just which one of the two co-writers, co-producers are singing when they are trading lines, whether it's the garage rock sprint of Salute Your Solution or the rustic folk-rock of Old Enough.
Oddly enough, it's Benson out front on some of the more excessively Stripes-like numbers like The Switch and the Spur, which with its mariachi horns and spaghetti western plot could be a sequel to the WS' Icky Thump of last year.
But while White, and particularly his guitar, is this album's brightest flame, it also seems the crutch for some of the weaker numbers.
The stronger songs seem to roll off the ivories - the likes of the piano-powered You Don't Understand Me, the Elton Johnesque Many Shades of Black and the Stonesy Pull This Blanket Off - come care of Benson's more measured approach.
But it's hard to fault the sheer vintage verve of their big-riff numbers, which start right from the time signature-crunching opener of the title track.
Their best classic rock tribute among the many here is Rich Kid's Blues, a terrifically Zeppelinesque cover of a song by Terry Reid, the man who, funnily enough, turned down the singing job in Led Zep and suggested Robert Plant to Jimmy Page.
And on the following number These Stones Will Shout they show they can do the pastoral acoustic Zeppelin before its powerchord finale turns it into a Who tribute, too.
And to end, a story - Carolina Drama is a White-yelped shaggy dog murder ballad telling a tragic tale of death by milk bottle.
It doesn't really have a point but the fun - as so much of Consolers of the Lonely shows - is in just how well the Raconteurs spin these yarns, as if they are stealing from ancient dusty rock texts and sounding exceedingly excited at getting away with it. Russell Baillie
