Oh man, it would have been so sweet if Jack White had finally lost his Midas touch. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has hoping for the chance to slam the red-and-white-clad tunesmith on his new splinter group outing. After all, the White Stripes leader has had a much better than normal track record with his main group and in his capacity as a musical facilitator. In the past half decade or so, White has been credited for reviving the career of a country music icon (Loretta Lynn), bringing new life into a preferred musical genre (garage rock) and helping to bring attention to plenty of other formerly obscure artists (both old and new). Hell, White’s touch is so powerful that all he has to do is beat the crap out of someone to make them (if only briefly) famous (Von Bondies, it was nice while it lasted). Of course, the Raconteurs isn’t just about Jack White—but it's his throat that we’d all be gunning for if the record sucked. Thankfully, Broken Boys Soldiers doesn’t suck. On the contrary, for an album with such a decidedly spontaneous and fun biography—the group was formed by White and pop tunesmith supreme Brendan Benson after a songwriting session that produced the anthemic “Steady As She Goes”—Broken Boys Soldiers sounds awfully well considered. Perhaps this consideration is owed to the tastefully chosen sum of the group’s parts. Drummer Patrick Keeler and bassist Jack Lawrence, well known to rock fans as the rhythm section for critical darlings the Greenhornes, previously worked with White and Benson on Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose. The Raconteurs seem to arrive ready-made as a solidly functioning unit and eschew the usual pratfalls of many supergroups who coast through their studio sessions on ego alone. The songs on Broken Boys Soldiers run the gamut from 1960s-inspired pop (“Yellow Sun”) to riff-heavy rave-ups (“Hands” and the title track) and old school R&B ballads (“Blue Veins”). And though the album clocks in at just 30 minutes, it’s pretty clear that we’re going to have to wait a lot longer if we want to give Jack White a reasonable public tongue-lashing. Maybe next year he’ll discover calypso or something.

The first impression isn’t always right. Mine: Are Jim James and My Morning Jacket going to sue these guys or what? Band of Horses initially seemed a straight ripoff of the Jacket’s reverb-drenched, back-porch, widescreen sound. Like most good things, however, I found that the more I got to know it, the more I saw its uniqueness. Additionally, here’s a case of wait and ultimately find reward. Band of Horses’ pedigree traces to the Seattle of the mid 1990s, but not from the typical grouping of flannel and flange guitar bands. Ben Bridwell and Matt Brooke were at the core of Carrisa’s Weird, a feted folk-pop group with a purposely misspelled name. That band’s demise led to what would become Band of Horses. The more I let singer/guitarist Ben Bridwell’s dreamy pastoral anthems seep in, the more Everything All the Time proved its splendorous power. Everything bears the timeless rock earmarks of warm reverb, with the feel of a richly detailed hymnal that captures life gone awry (“Great Salt Lake”), wistful sincerity (“The Funeral”) and half-dreamt recollections (“St. Augustine”). The playing here is laid-back, understated and note-perfect, while Bridwell’s voice carries across these songs, from the twangy whispers of “I Go to the Barn Because” to the blissful rock of “Weed Party,” like a boundless ocean.

Pity the hipster on a budget, trying to keep up with every Next Big Thing that crosses the Atlantic. The UK hype factory continues to crank out It-band after It-band of modern post-punk, at a pace that doesn’t leave much cash at the end of the month for smoking jackets and ironic t-shirts. Now here comes the stateside debut of Editors, a Birmingham quartet which owes as much debt of influence to Interpol as it does to Joy Division. You loved Silent Alarm and Arctic Monkeys as much as the next guy, but your wallet thinks this 1980s art-rock renaissance is getting out of hand. Should you: (a) divert part of your latte fund; (b) hit up your cooler friends who got the import last summer; or (c) just play Turn on the Bright Lights another 500 times and congratulate yourself for buying American? Since Artvoice does not condone the unauthorized copying of recorded music (ahem), the correct answer is (a). The Back Room is sharp and stylish, with an ominous tone that should make Ian McCulloch weep like a brand-new daddy. Tracks like “Munich,” “Blood” and “Bullets” surge with an intensity that sustains even when the tempo slows down, as on the lush “Open Your Arms.” The Back Room is neither perfect nor necessary, but—with apologies to your wallet—it is pretty damn good.