The gloss of celebrity served the Raconteurs well in the late aughts—“the White Stripes are dying, long live Jack White’s new radio-rock band!” But 11 years after the band’s last album, the novelty has faded and the Michiganers—Brendan Benson, Jack Lawrence, and Patrick Keeler alongside White himself—have found themselves floating in a weightless, haughty bliss, through a perpetual 2008. Help Us Stranger must now contend with the strength of a new indie rock field, and the mere fact of White’s affiliation is not nearly as compelling as it once was.
The Raconteurs make the strongest case for themselves through competent, workmanlike song construction. They’ve built a rock record that is sequenced perfectly; sturdy, but never staid. Raucous numbers like “Sunday Driver” recall the band’s biggest hit, 2006’s “Steady, As She Goes,” and they’re nestled alongside softer, more contemplative pieces, like the lovely, acoustic “Only Child.” The players swing skillfully from loud to quiet to loud, never neglecting either side of the scale. There are few surprises on Help Us Stranger, but that tends to be the case when you’re in the hands of capable adults.
Some light improvisation in the recording booth lends spontaneity without veering into the self-indulgence that so plagued White’s latest solo album, 2018’s Boarding House Reach. Off-the-cuff flourishes abound. Nigh-title track “Help Me Stranger” opens with a brief, bluesy rendition in miniature by the band’s bassist, Jack Lawrence, equalized to sound like Jimmie Rodgers on an old 78. “Now That You’re Gone,” too, is a welcome change: In its verses, the narrator lashes out, petty and vindictive, at a former lover—“Where you gonna go? Not that I care!”—only to slip in the chorus and lay bare his own lonely stupor: “What will I do now that you’re gone?” Without sacrificing sonic or thematic coherence, the Raconteurs vary their approach enough that each individual track sparkles.
But even the album’s brightest moments are colored by a kind of dull, grey disdain. Attempts to conjure bluesy commiseration and evoke alienation are uniformly bloodless. “Don’t Bother Me” is a poor choice for a rock refrain; the song’s rage is so impotent it may as well have been titled “Get Off My Lawn.” Other songs are undercut by static simplicity: “Some days, I just feel like crying/Some days, I don’t feel like trying.” Clunky as these lyrics are on the page, they’re diminished even further by the sheer lack of conviction in White and Benson’s vocal delivery. Their tone throughout is one of boredom, even irritation—with themselves, with anyone who might be listening, with the mundanities of making music.
The songs of Help Us Stranger often succeed only because they succeeded before, decades ago, as better songs. Tapping your foot to the giddy “Live A Lie” is fun until you recognize, in a too-familiar riff, a limp effort to conjure the anarchic, animal spirit of “Fell in Love With a Girl.” The piano lines and orotund group harmonies of “Shine the Light on Me” land like painted-by-numbers Sgt. Pepper’s, less tribute than hacky pageantry. The Raconteurs have never been coy about pastiche, but on this record, their motivation for mining the past feels firmly rooted in fear of the unfamiliar. White’s rapping on Boarding House Reach offered, at least, the perverse thrill of real transgression. Here, he never takes any risk so great that failure presents a real possibility. The band’s few efforts to innovate on their own catalogue are peccadilloes in the grand scheme: a new amp here, a new pedal setting there. The result is an air of timidity that dampens the pleasures this album does offer.
Other indie rock groups—supergroups, like boygenius even—are presently making music that is orders of magnitude greater than this record, often with vastly less experience, vastly fewer resources, and vastly higher barriers to entry. Recall the indelible moment in “Me & My Dog,” where Phoebe Bridgers’ voice becomes a scooped-out husk of itself, and she murmurs, ashamed, “I cried at your show with the teenagers.” Even in her own song, she is at somebody else’s show, her story dissolving into a crowd of other stories. The Raconteurs, by contrast, would never lower themselves to the level of their audience. They understand their presence on the stage as a given, not something to be earned anew. They have always stood in the spotlight. They assume that they always will.
Buy: Rough Trade
