Green
White Soul

"White Soul" is proof that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. Because in the best of all possible worlds, an album like this would be listened to and sung by the masses much more than that flaccid disco-pop which, in the days of the Green (or just a few years earlier), seemed to many to be the pinnacle of excitement that the music landscape could offer. On the other hand, the 80s were for rock the most lackluster decade in the mainstream, when you consider that the most popular rock band of the time was U2 (authors of a handful of memorable songs, but undoubtedly hostile to a concept of rock as "guts on display").
The guts of Jeff Lescher, undisputed protagonists of "White Soul." Jeff Lescher is one of the most gifted, most fiery, and most daring singers of all time. He stops at nothing. He does not hold back from producing heart-rending screams, off-key notes, kitsch falsettos; and the band follows him, like an unstoppable wave that overwhelms an unsuspecting surfer, like a group of drunks who plunge headlong into the designated victim of the stag, in the most ramshackle choirs that rock 'n' roll has ever known. Jeff Lescher has no qualms about letting the world know that he's madly in love and suffering like a dog. And this alone makes him an incomparable vehicle of searing and conflicting emotions. Conflicting especially: the melodrama of Jeff Lescher can only be staged through the dialectic of soft vs. loud, sweet with bitter, tender with violent. As in the heart-wrenching "Night After Night," which alternates caresses and outbursts, resolving in one of the most sincere glam-rock I've ever heard. Or like the unbearable confession of "I Love Her", punctuated by sardonic backing vocals.

All the songs on this album talk about love: the titles are among the most overused in the love song saga. And even the style or, rather, the styles are familiar: "My Sister Jane" mirrors Tom Petty, "Monique, Monique" updates Ray Davies, while the ghost of Alex Chilton hovers over much of the show. Yet, none of these serenades with classic armor looks like an exercise in style. Because (and it's essential to reiterate it) in rock music, what's important is having that fateful "something to say." Then the means with which to say it comes naturally. As an innovator, Lescher was insignificant: yet the 12 tracks of this album can alter the frequency of our heartbeats and generate that strange lump in the throat area.
Only Westerberg has gotten this far. And to Westerberg, the one from "Tim," Lescher rivals the title of best opener: just like "Hold My Life," his "She's Heaven" is a free song, fueled by a wandering guitar, which, at the moment it seems to fade away, regenerates eternally. The difference, perhaps, between these two giants (one recognized, one a bit less) of the Author's college-rock of the 80s is that Westerberg was a spokesperson for generational moods, while the tribulations of young Lescher were a purely private matter, the result of a romantic disappointment. And throughout the album, Jeff finds no peace, not even in the composed "Hear Me" and the exuberant "I Don't Even Know Her", vain attempts to distract the mind from the sadness.

The least convincing episodes occur when Lescher wants to be boastful, when he exaggerates, when he draws on the carefree and superficial soul-rock ("I'm In Love With You"); or when he resurrects garage legacy ("I Beg, You Cry"); or finally when he ventures into the most overdone scales ("Give Me Your Hands").
He is priceless, however, when he strolls anguished but not yet defeated in "I'm Not Giving Up" or when, in the grandiose finale of this tragic comedy, he scatters fuel on his vocals and sets it ablaze with a devastating "I Knooooooooooow": it is the apotheosis of this expressive masterpiece of romantic rock. In a rock, produced by the "generation X," often accused (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) of apathy and excessive introversion, it can only be pleasing, from time to time, to be submerged by Jeff Lescher’s genuine tears. And feel bad with him.