Send "The Black Keys " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 It behooves us to take 90 seconds here and figure out how this band got so popular and enduring. The Black Keys were born in the teeth of the early-aughts "Rock Is Back!" movement, wherein a cadre of uncouth garage-y bands all named The ______s saved us from the terrorists and/or the Backstreet Boys. Eventual result: deserved ignominy (the Vines), undeserved ignominy (the Hives), bewildered near-implosion (the Strokes), and bewildering total implosion (the White Stripes). The years have not been kind.You didn't figure the Keys as sole survivors and mainstream lifers when The Big Come Up emerged in 2002 and offered a walking rockist orgasm: two gawky white dudes from Akron, Ohio, drums and surly guitar and burning-oatmeal-mouthed yawps of not terribly articulate romantic frustration, all powering cartoonishly virile garage-blues jams of prison-phone-call fidelity and sentiment. Ridiculous and kind of awesome. (This assumes racially uneasy cultural appropriation is no longer an issue for you, but if so, feel free to evoke the Blueshammer scene in the Ghost World movie and the hell with it.) And so. They named their second album Thickfreakness; they recorded their third album in an abandoned tire factory and named it Rubber Factory. For a while there, they always did confoundingly well in critics' polls, as though they were every single rock scribe's seventh-favorite band. They evolved incredibly slowly-- you can enjoy their early work tremendously and never retain five consecutive seconds of it beyond their cover of "Have Love Will Travel". Danger Mouse got involved as a producer, to the immediately evident benefit of no one. Coupla daffy side projects in there somewhere. (BlakRoc!) Ah yes, and they got their music in a shitload of ads, from Victoria's Secret to Zales to American Express to Subaru, like just so much capitalism, to the extent that they went on The Colbert Report with Vampire Weekend and clowned themselves about it....full text |
| Spin |
| The same thing keeps happening when I listen to the new Black Keys album. I press play on the first track — lead single "Lonely Boy" — and after a few seconds of Dan Auerbach leaning into his glam-slam guitar and Patrick Carney smacking his snare as if it's the rump of a redheaded stepchild in need of some learnin', I start to imagine I'm a take-no-mess private dick named Sal St. Monica. Auerbach howls like he's used to getting what he wants, and in my mind, I'm hauling heavy ass in a '74 El Camino, burning after my crooked ex-partner, NuNu Rodriguez, fishtailing into trash cans and shit. NuNu owes me money. A lot of money. There's also the small matter of him and Darla. Damn, Darla. Auerbach lets loose randy whoa whoas, Carney pounds his kick drum, and I slam NuNu's ride into a telephone pole, drag him out of the car, and acquaint him with Master Right Cross and Commander Left Hook. Then comes song two. I enjoy this album very much. Music supervisors nationwide are surely hoping that, come the inevitable licensing, "Lonely Boy" and the ten other blues-pop shots on the irresistibly gaudy El Camino will make you feel very much like I do. No doubt the Akron-bred, now Nashville-based duo planned it that way. The album is the band's seventh, but their first since 2010's gold-certified, Grammy-winning Brothers boosted them from journeymen to stars. That ascent was largely the result of having an honest-to-goodness hit, the hook-laden "Tighten Up," the only track on that LP produced by Danger Mouse. He produces everything on this one. The numbers are easy to crunch....full text |
| Guardian |
| Nashville, Tennessee, is renowned as the home of country music. And yet this very traditional town has become home to a number of noisy, un-house-trained rock bands of late. Jack White moved his family from Detroit to Nashville some years ago to run Third Man Records; Nashville is where the troubled Kings of Leon call home. More recently, blues-rock duo the Black Keys left their native Ohio to take the waters and record their seventh album there. Buy it from Buy the CD The Black Keys El Camino WARNER BROS 2011 Tell us what you think: Rate and review this album Perhaps not coincidentally, El Camino finds the Black Keys moving into a space sited halfway between Jack's place and Leon mansions. Ever since the Black Keys' visceral second album, 2003's garage-blues romp Thickfreakness hoiked its riffs over the parapet, guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney have been dogged by unfavourable comparisons with the White Stripes, a similarly underpopulated, bass-less and raucous two piece with a colour in their name. The Keys finally shrugged off those comparisons with the release of their last album, 2010's Brothers, a Billboard No 2 album that catapulted the pair out of renown and into contention. It has sold around 1 million copies worldwide and bagged the band three Grammys, thanks in part to its louche subtlety, groove content and the nimble Danger Mouse production flourishes on its hit single, "Tighten Up". At the time of writing, the Black Keys have just sold out two nights at London's 10,000-capacity Alexandra Palace next February, laying bare the exaggeration in industry assumptions that rock acts are a spent force. El Camino, though, sounds nothing like Brothers. Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton is back on board for the whole album this time and he seems to have tightened up the Black Keys' act rather than loosened it. Sidelong, cross-genre winks at R&B are conspicuous by their absence. The album's Nashville genesis is pretty much irrelevant – the creative flags here all point to rock'n'roll and 60s garage. The Keys have also name-dropped the Clash and the Cramps as influences this time around, but neither really stands proud, unless you count the surprise reggae slouch that creeps up on "Hell of a Season"....full text |
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