Broken Boy Soldiers

Hometown favorites, for sure...but without the overtly matched attire and rumors...
This album is great because it's just wonderfully simple. It's not deep, it doesn't come with hype, it doesn't have Jack White plastered all over it when it's a group of great musicians from the area. Why do I give it a B, you ask? Because that what follows, if and when it does, is going to blow this out of the water.
The Detroit River, that is.
And I think it's best we wait until that.

Oh no, you got peanut butter all over my chocolate, and now it's ruined! Wait, maybe I'll just taste it anyway. Hey, this is...delicious. This is amazing! This is...two great tastes that taste great together!! Hey, what if Jack White and Brendan Benson started a band?

Basically Jack White and Brendan Benson could run a carpet cleaning company and it would rock so hard my brain would melt. Now, considering they stuck with what they're good at and started a band, one might assume any semblance of subjectivity on my part would be strictly negligible. But Broken Boy Soldiers is better than even I would have expected. Writing songs to these guys is so EASY, that when they're tossing off good/bad rhymes and crazy Led Zeppelin guitar riffs it's this effortless awesomeness that makes everyone else look desperately uncool for trying so hard. More than the sum of their parts, this is the pop, grit, grandiosity only hinted at from the individual Jack White/Brendan Benson oeuvre. Jim Jarmusch should write a Detroit Mystery Train to give these songs a proper home, since real life isn't nearly cinematic enough. PS become British because they're even better live.