Friday, December 22, 2006

The Raconteurs 12/30 & 12/31 @ Riviera Theatre

Celebrate New Year's with The Raconteurs and tell us about the show!

posted by WEBMASTER @ 1:04 PM   1 comments

1 Comments:

At 2:25 PM, Blogger WEBMASTER said...

MUSIC REVIEW

Raconteurs' story is getting better
Jack White and friends put on solid show at Riviera

By Andy Downing
Special to the Tribune
Published January 2, 2007


"The Raconteurs opened its 90-minute set with a loose jam session, the four group members huddling around drummer Patrick Keeler's kit as if they were in the midst of band rehearsal and not onstage at a sold-out Riviera Theatre. The message was clear: This was not some Jack White vanity project, but a full-on collaboration--each member capable of going toe-to-toe with the fiery White Stripes frontman.

The project started as something of a guys-night-out for White, who has been recording blues-fueled rockers and schoolchildren ditties with ex-wife/amateur drummer Meg White since 1997. For his part, the singer/guitarist clearly enjoyed the interplay, trading verses with longtime pal and co-frontman Brendan Benson on "Level" and cracking a wide smile as Keeler hammered out a thundering beat on another tune, White swinging his guitar aside to air drum for several measures.

Making its first Chicago appearance since this summer's Lollapalooza, the Raconteurs sounded in fine form as it worked through the bulk of its debut record, "Broken Boy Soldiers" (V2), along with a handful of carefully selected covers, during the first performance of a two-night stand on Saturday. "Blue Veins," something of an afterthought on the album, was here transformed into a shape-shifting blues stomp, White shrieking the chorus as if his entire body were on fire. Sonny Bono's "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" swung through five acts of Shakespearean tragedy, White delivering the penultimate line, "She shot me down, bang bang," as if each bullet had directly pierced his heart.

Benson uncovered the sweet center of "Together," an acoustic ballad that shuffled through lonesome highways and deserted country bars. The evening's biggest surprise might have been the power and dexterity of the band's unheralded rhythm section, on loan from Cincinnati garage rock trio the Greenhornes. Jack Lawrence's buoyant basslines throbbed and sighed on the heartbroken "Call It a Day," while Keeler consistently pounded his kit with all the ferocity of Edward Norton's beating of Jared Leto in "Fight Club." The addition of a touring keyboardist, Dean Fertita of Detroit's The Waxwings, brought out the loose psychedelia in songs like "Store Bought Bones." On record, it sometimes sounds as if the band is self-consciously splitting work between its frontmen--polar opposites right down to the color of their hair. But live, the interplay is becoming increasingly natural, the sound of a new group finally and forcefully coming into its own."

 

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