THE RACONTEURS Broken Boy Soldiers XL Recordings *****

Band side projects are often half-hearted, non-committal doodles, each participant contributing the bare minimum and keeping their best ideas to themselves. But when Jack White and his mate Brendan Benson hooked up with Patrick Keeler and Jack Lawrence from The Greenhornes, the separate parts seem to have added up to one sparkling four-way equation.

White had already covered The Greenhornes' superb Shelter of Your Arms for a White Stripes B-side, and the song provides a signpost of sorts towards the tunes on this collection. The rootsy, stripped-down punk sound of The White Stripes is replaced by a bluesy, psychedelic spunkiness, as evinced by the Hammond-driven lysergic grooves of Intimate Secretary, Level and Yellow Sun. White and Benson write the tunes, and you can easily discern Benson's power-pop influence on Hands and Call It a Day. Opening track and current single Steady as She Goes should already be familiar, if only for the riff that sounds like Joe Jackson's Is She Really Going Out with Him?, but there are other recognisable touchstones, such as the title track's flashback to Syd Barrett-era Floyd or the Soft Machine-meets-Deep Purple squelch of Store Bought Bones.

The album ends all too quickly - after 33 minutes - with the bluesbreaking, backward lurch of Blue Veins, but not even Tom Cruise could have come up with a more action-packed half-hour than this quartet of accomplished storytellers. www.theraconteurs.com

Kevin Courtney