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The Raconteurs perform "Steady as She Goes" on "Broken Boy Soldiers"

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.