Consolers of the Lonely

"If you play rock, you’re retro.”

I've been listening to this album pretty much non-stop this week.
I've wanted to blog on it, but it didn't seem timely enough.

I was gonna write about how this album sounds like it was recorded in 1974. How it sounds like equal parts White Stripes, The Band, Queen, Judas Priest, The Police, Fairport Convention, Jethro Tull, Phish, Derek and the Dominoes, and Fleetwood Mac.

Then I read this article in the UK paper, The Sun:

The Raconteurs’ raw garage blues is often described as retro and draws comparison with legendary British bands such as The Who and Led Zeppelin. But Jack says: “We get those comments in The Stripes as well. We want our music to be timeless. It’s just that we like to play real instruments recorded on equipment that suits them best.”

The retro tag makes Brendan quite incensed: “I’d like somebody to describe to me what contemporary music actually sounds like. It’s because we play rock music. If you play rock, you’re retro.”

Does Jack mind how his music is constantly compared with others?

“I think a lot of critics and listeners don’t realise that there are two types of songwriters. Some listen to songs and rip them off and some write songs that end up sounding like someone else.

On These Stones Will Shout, there’s a a part in there where we go to the D, the C, when it goes electric, that you could imagine someone saying, ‘That sounds like The Who’. But that doesn’t mean we’re gonna change it.

When you’re recording, you don’t hire some guy with a dictionary to stand by and say, ‘Ah, ah, ah, that sounds like Devo. Stop right now.’
I talked to Jimmy Page and I was saying that Led Zeppelin owned the riff. Any band who writes a riff, any riff ever, it gets compared to Led Zeppelin, from Rage Against The Machine and on and on to The White Stripes. It’s the same with The Beatles. They own melodic. The Beach Boys own vocal harmonies. There’s these bands that did it first and they own it for all eternity.”

Spot on, Jack, I totally agree.

Here's "Many Shades of Black" live at the Coachella Festival last month.

It's a fucking brilliant song. I would compare it to Queen and Cream (Queem?), but I won't. Jack's right. If you play rock, you’re retro.



Brendan Benson had this to say about that album's "rush-to-market."
"The way the music industry is right now, so much fear is thrown upon a band.

We have to figure out all this dumb little internet-based or digital-based trickery to make things work, to get our chart position, to make the first week’s sales really big, to make some sort of impact."

He added: "You get asked to do all these kind of aol.com things. You play a performance that 50,000 people hit on every day or you release two months early to radio. It’s all so wearing.

Somehow, when you’ve finished an album, it doesn’t seem worth it. That stuff takes a lot of energy out of you that could be put into something more productive and creative, like playing shows. We just wanted to put it out."

Benson also claimed the group were sick of record labels giving up on bands after only one album.

"They stop," he said. "They consider it a failure. They are completely losing the plot. Things need to grow. That’s the whole point of signing a band. You gamble."

Source: The Sun