‘Consolers Of The Lonely’

An album review for rockfeedback.com

‘Jack White’s other band is a Harley’ is how the promotional bumper sticker should have read, were there any kind of promotional assault for The Raconteurs second album. As it goes, and as I’m sure you’ll already know, there was grand total of zip spent on promo-ing this record: in an admirable gesture of insouciance the albums release was announced just one week before being indiscriminately lobbed at fans, blaggards and freebie snatchers alike.

In a lot of ways it’s understandable. The White Stripes are enormous. Their unprecedented arc from incestuous outsiders to stadium filling ‘somebodys’ has ensured that any idiot with ears knows exactly who they are. Presumably not wanting this to colour peoples’ opinion of his latest project, Jacky Sun Block slapped a veto on the worldwide knitting circle. A bold move that suggests only two possible outcomes: should he hold form as world beating songsmith with yet another banger to add to the cannon he comes out vindicated, cash registers a ringing and more festival invites than he and the gang can shake a shitty fringe at. If, however, the offerings are anything less than second best Our Young Protagonist finds himself met with indifference, is asked to stop knocking about with those older boys and is ordered back into the house to play with his vaguely autistic sister/ex-lover/drummer (delete as appropriate).

Fortunately for him, us and everybody else, ‘Consolers Of The Lonely’ is a five-dicked monster of classic rock proportions and looks likely to become the summer soundtrack of safer stereos the world over. Though never straying too far from a 1… 2… 3… 4…the scope of styles is admirable: think of a music that has a ‘Rock’ suffix and you’ll find it here- Hard, Blues, Prog, Shock, Schlock, Country, Cock, and most predominantly… Dad. What’s still more impressive is the manner in which it’s all put together; with writing and delivery as distinct as Old Milky Chops it’s an accomplished group of musicians who can play with him and sound like a band.

The opening title track sets an important precedent that runs throughout the hour or so of music. It begins with a fairly typical bastardised blues riff, the kind of which you can’t play with your feet any closer than a meter together, slow and menacing like a self medicated sex pest. Then the hi-hats count into a completely different timing and all of a sudden ‘Consolers of the Lonely’ is transformed into a muscular lump of Math Metal that leaps through tempos with all the aplomb of a Russian gymnast. Important Precedent Number One: anytime The Milky Bar kid starts sounding like the White Stripes, the older boys grab him by his musical belt hoops, hold him upside down till his lunch money falls out of his pockets and threaten him with a good duffing up should he do it again.

From hereon in the album moves and grows with each song- fiddles, Mariachi horn sections, pianos and banjos are incorporated here and there, underpinned throughout by Patrick Keeler’s accomplished drum work (let’s be honest, anyone who’s had the pleasure of watching the Stripes live must have thought ‘I wonder what he’d be like with a decent drummer behind him’) and the production, which ultimately serves as a the albums hallmark. There are more than a couple of attempts to deconstruct the production process that speak volumes about the way they went about making Consolers of the Lonely; when you hear His Whiteness say “Oh, we’ll double track that right there” you realise it’s a sentence they used upwards of 40 times a day, such is the aural girth of the fourteen tracks.

A similar deconstruct at the albums close goes some way into explaining Our Young Protagonists need to work on a project such as The Raconteurs; above the chatter of a rather polite sounding party, you hear the voice of a small girl, presumably the fruit off Chalky’s loins. It’s then you realise that Poppa Pale’s journey into the realms of Fatherhood has brought out in him an instinctive urge to produce an album that would have been impossible to make with Egg White- this is essentially Dad Rock for the Twenty First Century; it’s the sound of steering wheels doubling as snare drums and probably the only album Jeremy Clarkson will buy this year. The very mention of Clarkson will no doubt cause the more liberal stomach to turn, but Consolers of the Lonely shares more than a couple of attributes with Top Gear, the main one being thus: when you’re dissecting culture with the Skins brigade, it’s the kind of thing you dismiss with instant abhorrence. But, and here’s the rub, when you’re lying prostrate on a sofa on a Sunday, life force low and imagination non-existent it seems to make perfect, if somewhat secretive, sense.