I had originally intended to use this forum as a venue for a varied series of (no doubt brilliant) essays and ruminations regarding the fallen state of our American world. However, I am very, very lazy. Also, I am mostly unfocused when it comes to musing. Instead, I will use this online text-distribution mechanism to write a little something about albums – not necessarily “reviews” per se, but those types of entries could very well happen. Ideally, I will write something about every album, EP, and 7-inch, and single I own. However, I’ve got a lot of crap in my shack. We’ll see how it goes.
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The Raconteurs, Consolers of the Lonely
I feel a certain kinship with Jack White. He’s a perverse, contrary bugger — a tightly-wound bundle of stylized anachronism. Of course, the White Stripes are known as much for their formalism and self-imposed “limits” (visual and musical) as they are for their infectious, oddball American music. Not surprisingly, Jack’s other, proper band the Raconteurs is likewise an exercise in willful anachronism.
Initial press clippings around the time of the band’s debut Broken Boy Soldiers quoted the band’s desire to ape beloved power pop failures Big Star — themselves retro in an era that didn’t even have a real notion of “retroness” yet. The Raconteurs’ website is a mock green screen console. The music on Boy Soldiers is new-wavish pop rock that sounds like nothing so much as a louder, more-electrified Rubber Soul. Not exactly the stuff that the 21st Century is made of.
With Consolers of the Lonely, White, Benson, et al. renew their commitment to backwards-looking contrivance. The album was released on March 25th, sans fanfare (save for the week-before press release announcing that there would be no fanfare). The swift, promo-free release was (among other things) described as an end-run around the contemporary major label release cycle where promotion and first week sales are all-important concerns. The implication is that the process of listening to new records needs to be readjusted to some pre-promo ideal where word of mouth and musical quality were the only hawking required.
The very package of Consolers (at least the CD version — the album is available as download, big vinyl platter, or shiny digital coaster) is backwards focused. The cover art features the band in old-timey junkshop drag reminiscent of the artwork for Dylan and the Band’s own retro posing on the cover of the official Basement Tapes release. The Raconteurs’ album art establishes the band as denizens of the “old weird America” through costume, photographic process (tintype), and a visual universe outfitted with all manner of analog-looking bric-a-brac. These visual markers are part of a vocabulary used by retro-minded artists like Dylan, Tom Waits, Dresden Dolls, and many, many others. These tropes are visual shorthand for all that is traditional and unsleek. In short, it connotes a “pre-Beatles” world. Heck, even the Beatles (when they had tired of their mod selves) used the iconography of the Salvation Army type band in the Sgt. Pepper’s artwork to evoke a simpler time.
Consolers of the Lonely
The Basement Tapes
Orphans
The Dresden Dolls
Interestingly, the Raconteurs’ retro markers have no real bearing on the musical content of Consolers. The tracks are punchy, engaging pop/rock songs that rely mainly on guitar, voice, and drums to deliver their kicks. Predictably, the Raconteurs’ songs sound like Jack White and Brendan Benson numbers as tweaked by the other songwriter. Consolers, like Boy Soldiers, is classicist guitar rock — which is where all this retroness gets tricky. This new album (like the band’s debut) is a well-crafted listenable blast of energetic, melodic rock music, and as such it is nothing conceptually shocking. The old-timey trappings, however, belie a conceptual/aesthetic/political statement. In short, the overall feeling is that the Raconteurs consider this type of well-crafted, quietly-released “traditional” rock music to be going the way of the dodo (a creature pictured repeatedly in the CD booklet, incidentally). The band therefore sets themselves up as “new traditionalists,” keepers of the flame. This conceptual move is not new to rock.
The Ramones and other punks allied themselves with the obsolete rockabilly, surf rock, and girl group sounds/visual styles. Alt-country acts and “new traditionalists” like Dwight Yoakum, Steve Earle, etc. have long made the argument that the Nashville establishment was doing away with “real country” in favor of a new, corporate-approved surrogate. However, whenever a pack of flame-keepers claim underdog status for the “real” form of rock/country/folk/whathaveyou, the new, pure audience can overlook the reality that the original, influential artists were often HUGELY popular and thoroughly of their time. Johnny Cash was a hit maker. The Ronnettes ruled the charts. Rock and roll was tremendous pop force from Elvis through disco. They may not make them like the used to, but that’s not reason enough to rewrite history. I mean, they *used* to make ‘em, didn’t they?
The retreat into an imagined weirdo past in the face of a gathering darkness is appealing to me as a listener and student of American pop. I certainly have an affinity for popular culture from decades just before I was born. And retreating into a retro version of THOSE ’60s/’70s bands’ trips to the murky American past feels in a way like going home again. Still, I can’t help but think that an album as likeable Consolers of the Lonely deserves better than the Piltdown Man status it gets when treated as some kind of manufactured fossil.
