Jack White has gotten a lot of mileage out of his limited palette. Sure, all that red and white looks striking, and the raw, co-ed blues setup has been fruitful enough to spawn a gaggle of imitators. But the real advantage of self-imposed limits is that the most minute change to White's formula appears gigantic-- consider the buzz that surrounded the introduction of black into his wardrobe circa Elephant's release.
With the White Stripes seemingly on hiatus, Jack White has the time and freedom to alter more than his visual aesthetic. Just in time, too, as both Elephant and Get Behind Me Satan revealed that Jack and Meg had backed their sound up against a wall. Our first exposure to Jack White's 2006 sound was the exploration of Abbey Road-like psychedelic orchestration in a song commissioned by Coca-Cola, his corporate brethren in barber-pole color schemes. Now comes a Midwest supergroup that includes fellow Michigander Brendan Benson and the rhythm section from I-75 commuters the Greenhornes.
Injecting new blood into his vampire persona would be beneficial to White's career, as would collaborating with another songwriter in Benson, working with an honest-to-god bassist and trained drummer, and generally being kept from succumbing to his own retro-obsession self-indulgences. On the other hand, the Raconteur recruits aren't exactly modern-minded themselves, with Benson being a devout merchant of power-pop and the Greenhornes traveling the same Nuggets-plundering path as the Stripes themselves. As a result, Broken Boy Soldiers isn't much of a departure, nudging White only a couple clicks over in his classic-rock worship.
Yet, as already established, forced perspective makes even these small steps appear as significant strides for Mr. White. It's there in lead single "Steady as She Goes", even though it's subtle; the improvements mostly come with hearing one of his compositions freed from the laboriously low-tech "realism" of the White Stripes' recent material. It's there even more in the album's title song, where tribal drums and an ominous bowed drone buttress White's valiant attempt at a passable Geddy Lee. Even the rote blues emulation of "Blues Vein" comes off more "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" than From the Cradle, saved from reenactment status by some backward-loop weirdness and film-noir production.
Credit White with allowing the Raconteurs to be a two-party system; though I've spent the review focusing on the head Stripe, Benson is an equal partner in this operation, and it's his power-pop rubric that largely dictates the sound of the album. Benson-sung songs like "Hands" and "Intimate Secretary" crackle with a Cheap Trick kind of charm, given extra heft by White's predilection for harder guitar sounds. "Store Bought Bones" might be the best merger of the assembled talents, featuring a distorted organ and manic slide-guitar that would be tired amidst a White Stripes record, but retains its zang here alongside a nimble rhythm section and Benson's understated vocals.
But tie on the celebrity blindfold, and Broken Boy Soldiers no longer seems like that much of an achievement-- just another case of men recreating their favorite vinyl deep cuts, if a bit more skillfully than most FM scrapbookers. The album may prove the Raconteurs to be more than just a vanity project, but still falls short of making enough of an impact to totally overshadow the components' origins. It may be refreshing like an ice-cold soda to see White toe-dipping into new territory, but making the switch from black and white (and red) to living color is thrilling only in the relative sense.
