Eighteen months ago, when The Times spoke to The Raconteurs, a faintly agitated Brendan Benson declared, “Everyone thinks this is a Jack White side-project.” Two feet to his right, White attempted to mollify him. “But don’t you think that idea is going away now?” It was an uncomfortable sight – watching the younger, more famous musician donning kid gloves in a bid to allay the insecurities of his older, less well-known colleague. Striking a note of diplomacy, the man from The White Stripes added that he couldn’t blame people for thinking that way. Had he been looking in from the outside, he added, “I would have definitely had preconceptions.”

After one album – in this case, 2006’s Broken Boy Soldiers – the whiff of side-project is understandable. After two, you’ve probably earned the right to be called whatever you like – especially when you’ve moved to the same town (Nashville) to enjoy each other’s company. Besides, after conducting modest promotional duties for The White Stripes’ Icky Thump, it’s no longer plausible to think of The Raconteurs as White’s musical dress-down Friday. Consolers Of The Lonely suggests that, at least sonically, it’s getting impossible for White to draw a line between what suits a White Stripes song and what suits a Raconteurs tune.

The inevitable overlap between White’s two bands seemed to begin in earnest with Icky Thump. On that album, You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do What You’re Told) and Martyr For My Love For You seemed to drape powerpop gladrags over White’s new band.

Consolers Of The Lonely confirms that it works the other way too. Roughly two-thirds of what The Raconteurs have rushed out to the world today is a torrential blues rock album, whose sudden, spontaneous release seems to mirror the manner in which these songs were assisted into the world.

“Deep Purple mixed with a little Cat Stevens – but using drum machines”, jested White when asked to predict the outcome in 2006. Well, if you want to take him at his word, there are detectably purple elements on a title track that erupts from a child in a crowded room asking, “Daddy will you tell me the story about the chicken?” The sense of a band warming up in informal surroundings is compounded by another voice uttering, “We’ll double-track that.” It’s a rare moment of knowingness a minute or so before a guitar solo that sounds like a Harley Davidson angrily attempting to start itself on a cold morning.

Assembled from the similarly heavy components, Salute Your Solution sees White holding forth over the top of his band’s souped-up blues racket in a manner that recalls a young green Peter Green in Fleetwood Mac.

It’ll probably sound overwhelming live, but at the same time, this is also where you start remembering what you loved about Broken Boy Soldiers – the way its rock tendencies were matched at every turn by big-hearted pop monsters like Hands and Intimate Secretary.

For that sense of being attacked by an enormous a psych-pop hairdryer, there’s nothing quite like the latter tune on Consolers Of The Lonely. But, sure, when The Raconteurs eschew a tenth of that bluster for craft and restraint, you feel like you’ve been thrown a lifeline. Delivered with typical hellfire zeal, Carolina Drama sees White impart a cinematic narrative involving a dysfunctional family, murder, milkmen and paternal pride that swells to a rousing climax of la-la-las. Punctuated by a Greek chorus of horns, there’s a bedraggled air of showmanship in the delivery of Many Shades Of Black – which sees Benson singing, “Everyone agrees that you and I are wrong/And it’s been that way too long.” Three minutes in, even a guitar solo which seems to channel Brian May can’t derail what amounts to a kiss-off song to rival (if not quite top) Fleetwood Mac’s Go Your Own Way.

A few songs previously, a single foray into the musical vernacular of English 70s folk-rock yields the album’s best moment. “When I was young,” sings White (possibly to his younger self?), “I thought I knew/You probably think that you do too.” Behind him, a guesting violin exhumes ghosts of a post-Sandy Denny Fairport and you momentarily imagine a more satisfying future direction that The Raconteurs might have taken.

Instead, the presiding maxim on the rest of Consolers Of The Lonely is, when in doubt, turn it up and shout.

The problem is played out in microcosm on the penultimate song, These Stones Will Shout. For a few bars, this frayed acoustic meditation reminiscent of Nick Drake’s last few songs has you in its thrall, before – with what by now is a wearying sense of inevitability – a staggered detonation of electrified major chords and drum fills leave it resembling far too much of what we’ve already heard on here.

In mitigation, even from this vantage point, it’s possible to see that when the show rolls into town – mixing, as it will, these tunes with the more varied songs from the first album – many of the problems will disappear. If tunes like Five To The Five and Hold Up serve any useful purpose, it’s to tell you that this is a band who can’t wait to hit the road. But, on the train, in the car, doing the dishes, it’s debatable how much of this declamatory bombast your life can accommodate. Certainly, you’d think The Raconteurs might have felt they had come up with enough of their own without adding a version of Terry Reid’s Rich Kid Blues to the mix.

All of which leads you to further ponder the last-minute nature of this album’s release. “We wanted to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the exact same time so that no-one has the upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception,” said the band in a statement last week. That may be so, but at the same time, you have to ask yourself: if White, Benson et all felt they’d come up with the best songs of their career would they really have wanted to brush away the fanfare that comes with that sort of achievement?

As it is, Consolers Of The Lonely’s arrival into the world is set to be a retrained and unassuming one.

Shame you couldn’t apply those qualities to more of its contents.

(XL)

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