…is being released tomorrow.
No advance promos, and only a week’s advance buzz before the dropping of a new album entitled Consolers of the Lonely.
If you head over to the band’s website, you’ll be able to read their official announcement about the album, but the key paragraphs are these:
The album was mastered and completed in the first week of March. It was then taken immediately to a vinyl pressing plant. Then to a CD pressing plant. Then preparations to sell it digitally began. March 25th became the soonest date to have it available in EVERY FORMAT AT ONCE. The band have done no interviews or advertisements for this record before this announcement.
The purpose: to get the album to the fans as soon as possible and as we promised. We wanted to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding it’s availability, reception or perception.
With this release, The Raconteurs are forgoing the usual months of lead time for press and radio set up, as well as forgoing the all important “first week sales.” We wanted to explore the idea of releasing an album everywhere at once and THEN marketing and promoting it thereafter. The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by it’s first week’s sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it.
Y’know, I gotta tell ya, those final thirteen words in the above excerpt were thisclose to being a definitive “you had me, then you lost me” moment for this writer.
I admit to a certain amount of excitement for Consolers of the Lonely – I liked the last album, so I’m certainly curious to hear the new record – but thanks to those thirteen words, it’s now quite clear that, for as great a concept as it is to float an album to the masses without a massive advertising campaign and see if it succeeds on its own merits, at least part of the reason for this method is to give Jack White another opportunity to make his favorite blanket statement, “Fuck those assholes in the press.”
Despite the fact that the Raconteurs are clearly enjoying the coincidence of timing, let’s be quite clear about this: the quiet-is-the-new-loud method of pre-publicity is almost certainly nothing to do with Maxim’s Black Crowes review fiasco, since the decision to release Consolers via this off-the-radar method would’ve been made long before that controversy reared its head. You may recall that I branded White an asshole just last year after his comments in the NME about how journalists were idiots for believing information that was put in his band’s official press release. All you have to do is just look at those big-ass capital letters in the lines from the press release to know that White put them there; you can imagine him typing them out, then flipping off the computer screen and screaming, “Yeah! That’s right! Fuck you guys!”
Okay, fair enough, White’s still got an agenda, but the closing lines of the band’s missive about the album offer a very key sentence that rescues the release methodology for me:
“The Raconteurs feel very strongly that music has worth and should be treated as such.”
Indeed. Which is why I say that, despite having a complete jackass in their line-up, I’m hoping very strongly that Consolers of the Lonely proves to be a successful experiment for the Raconteurs.
Oh, BTW, there’s a nice piece by David Bennun about the album’s imminent release over at The Guardian’s website, where, after acknowledging that “one might even see this as a direct attack on the very existence of music journalism,” he, too, praises the idea in principle…but the best part for me were the final pair of paragraphs:
“But let’s not do the Raconteurs down; just because they have the luxury of putting out their album in this fashion, it doesn’t mean they’re obliged to. They have chosen to, and good luck to them. Only a cynic would point out that when a film is released without preview screenings for critics, it’s usually because it’s so dire that it overrides the dictum about no publicity being bad publicity. And only Bill Hicks’s hated notional marketeer would view this as a marketing gimmick in itself: ‘They’re going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market, they’re very smart.’
“I prefer to think of it as a genuine attempt to preserve the pleasures of the LP in a world where the phrase ‘LP’ is (wrongly, in my view) seen as redundant. As for whether this particular LP is worthy of such a gesture, I have no idea. I haven’t heard it. Of course.“
