The Saboteurs, or the Raconteurs to everyone else in the world other than Australians, might be a side-project for Whites Stripes main man Jack White and his good bud (and solo artist) Brendan Benson, but they’re quickly becoming something far more than that.

Where the band’s debut felt like an experiment of songwriting styles – Jack got to play with another guitarist, a bass player and a drummer both borrowed from the Greenhornes, while Brendan got to be part of the band dynamic – their second is so much more. Consolers of the Lonely is the sort of album that defies easy categorisation, going from the stomping rock ‘n roll found on opener Consoler of the Lonely to the awesome storytelling of closer California Drama.

It’s also a more varied and textured album, with the four-piece now clearly more comfortable playing together – so much so that for their live shows they’ve added a keyboardist and a fiddle player to their show. “He was doing gardening for Jack,” deadpans Brendan of violinist Mark Watrous. “We had auditions – well, we had one audition and all loved him, and that was it. We were terrified of auditioning people.”

One thing that the Saboteurs weren’t terrified of was the reaction that they were expecting for Consolers of the Lonely. The group went through a very different process to unleash it upon the public – instead of having months of build-up in the press and a media campaign orchestrated to create awareness of its impending release, they simply put out a press release saying it was coming…and then two weeks after it was available for everyone to hear.

“That was Jack’s idea,” Brendan confirms. “It’s always such a drag for the band, we’re all tired of that three-month lead-in. So we thought what’s the fastest we can get it out?”

It’s another case of a band taking control over their own music, much as Radiohead have for the release of In Rainbows, and how Nine Inch Nails have for the many releases due for that group throughout 2008.

“It’s a sign that shit is changing,” he agrees. “The way to do things is not necessarily the way – the customs are proving to be not that effective. We were certainly wondering, and it just made more sense for us for everyone [meaning the press and the public] to get the record at the same time. So there can’t be any decision made about the record before it comes out, with a consensus reached. When kids get it, either they’ve heard that it’s no good or they’ve heard that it’s brilliant.

“Whatever,” he sniffs dismissively of the record industry’s normal process of releasing an album, whereby the reviews are written before the public has heard the music. “To me it seems so obvious – and I’m having a hard time articulating myself because it seems so simply and the way it should be.”

With the deliberate approach that they took to the release of Consolers of the Lonely, it’s no surprise to find that the approach the Saboteurs took to making it was much the same – it was a very deliberate approach to make it a much more lively record than their debut.

“We never discussed it as a band, but I think I had more to do with that than anyone else in the band,” Brendan speculates. “What I’ve learned about playing in a band like the Raconteurs is just how much fun it is to make these more bombastic songs. So I had that in mind the whole time. And Jack does too – he’s concerned with how, when making a record, how it will be done live. And I’ve never done that; I don’t care. So a lot of times it’s no fun to play the [solo] songs because you’ve got to work out how to represent what you’ve created in the studio. So what I was into was creating these songs that would be fun, and rocking, songs. It’s the best stuff to play live, so have fun!”

Given that Brendan has his way of working, and Jack clearly has his way of working, how does the approach work when the two come together to write as one?

“There’s no process,” he states. “There’s no one way of doing something and it’s different all the time. A lot of times a song isn’t ever fully realised – we have ideas, we have songs pretty much fleshed out, but then in the studio we tweak them and Patrick and LJ help flesh them out.

“There are times when I have songs pretty much complete and Jack might tweak some things, or once we sat on his porch with some guitars and started playing and that was California Drama. He took it and finished it. There’s no ‘one’ process.”

It sounds like an intuitive process, and that’s exactly how Brendan describes the band as a whole, with a natural flow found in their writing and recording processes. That, too, can lead to certain difficulties.

“Sometimes you want to know where there’s a beginning, middle, and an end,” he admits, before countering his own argument. “But that gets boring too. Most of the time even when playing shows we don’t have a set-list at all – people just call out songs.”

Yet there is a sense of structure to Consolers of the Lonely – it begins with a led Zeppelin-like swagger on the title cut and Salute Your Solution, incorporates the Memphis Horns on The Switch and the Spark, and closes with one of the best songs Jack White has penned lyrics for in a long, long time, the elegiac and countrified California Drama.

“We were careful about the sequencing on the record,” he says. “I don’t think we decided on it necessarily – we knew what we wanted to start with and what we wanted to end with, and then some songs seemed like a deep cut, for later in the record, and it came together like that – some songs sounded great after another, and we created transitions. But, again, it’s another one of those intuitive things; it was almost scary sometimes in that everyone agreed.

“You know what we did?” Brendan asks. “We all wrote down a sequence of what we thought how the record should go, then compared them, and they were all almost exact it was frightening. Everyone had the same idea, give or take a few things.”

Now that, ladies ‘n gentlemen, is a band working as one.

The Saboteurs’ Consolers of the Lonely is available now.