Well, I haven’t listened to The Raconteurs in a while. Especially the first album, which I used to adore. I still like it, of course, I don’t stop liking things. It just got overshadowed by a lot of other things. After the greatness of The Dead Weather, The Raconteurs kind of faded out a bit. They became only the third most important Jack White activity project. Also, compared to both The White Stripes and The Dead Weather, they come off as a bit lightweight and pop, first album especially, again. It’s no sin to be pop, of course, but Broken Boy Soldiers is kind of sunshiny and Beatlesque in a way that doesn’t quite fit in with the feedback-loving raw power of the Weather or the Stripes’ primitivism. Not all of it, of course, some tracks are very much in keeping with what I think of as the Jack White aesthetic. Blue Veins is very Jack, for example. But a lot of it is very Brendan Benson, and this track is very Brendan-Benson-does-The-Beatles. I don’t know if I’m the only one to notice, but Hands is reminiscent of Only A Northern Song to the point of being derivative. Maybe if Only A Northern Song was more famous there’d be a scandal, but since it’s known only to watchers of Yellow Submarine, the imitation has gone unnoticed. Which is fine – if Beatlesqueness was a crime, half the musicians in the world would be in prison.
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