Across their career The Black Keys have been applauded for following the example of Fleet Foxes or Bon Iver, by breathing new indie life in to a style of music your dad will be confused to hear you playing. The Ohio double act that is Patrick Carney and Dan Auerbach are making old school bluesy rock and roll cool again with a sound that’s reminiscent of Eric Clapton as much as it is with say, the Raconteurs.
Their rise to indie popularity has come rapidly but by no means uncontrollably. Not over assisted by media hype, but simply through well-deserved recognition taking them from headlining academies after their fabulous last album “Brothers”, released only 18 months ago, to taking on an ambitious feat of headlining three consecutive dates at London’s cavernous Alexandra Palace.
It’s ever more so the case in the modern music business that if you’re a small upcoming band, the only way you can expect to get recognised is by being as flamboyant, left field and original as possible. Subsequently its feels like “arty” is music journalisms most thrown around genre predicate. Friendly Fires are apparently “Art Pop”. The Vaccines have been coined by some magazines as “art-rock” and most irritatingly of all for me was reading in NME that Pulled Apart By Horses (a punk band that buy their clothes from Topman) are supposedly “art-punk”? Nonsense! But thank God here is an album that I hope will completely evade any “art” treatment.
I say this because El Camino is simply The Black Keys doing what they have always done and what they do best over 11 short tracks of rock and roll perfection. And that is their honed skill for working fuzzy guitar rhythms in to grooves that take you by the hips and have you toe tapping in earnest while some of the most infectious and sexy choruses you’ll have heard all year hook you after your first listen. If you liked “Brothers”, their previous album which is still only just finding its place with the mainstream masses, then you will be smiling ear to ear after this 39 minute trip.
The album does vary within itself though with its crescendos and dips of tempo. Opener “Lonely Boy” is a belter! It’s almost Queens of the Stone Age minus the drugs and violence and seems like it would fit perfectly as the soundtrack to a Deep South desert police car chase movie scene. Meanwhile “Little Black Submarines” begins as a more melancholy and soulful acoustic affair with heartbroken retrospective lyrics but then erupts half way in to something The Raconteurs could have produced if you switched Jack White with an undead Jimi Hendrix.
If middle aged men and women, the kind of people who cut their moustaches off and stopped wearing bright colors when they realised they weren’t in fashion any more in the 80s, started bothering with new music again, then this band would no doubt have exploded in to chart topping success by now and been in the glove compartments of family cars all over the country. The only conceivable problem that faces The Black Keys is that if they keep making albums that are consistently samey, even if they are great every time, then they will provoke criticism that all their albums are too similar. Well to be frank, if the Foo Fighters or Noel Gallagher can get away with it then why not these guys too? If it ain’t broke then don’t fix it so more of the same please good Sirs!
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Their rise to indie popularity has come rapidly but by no means uncontrollably. Not over assisted by media hype, but simply through well-deserved recognition taking them from headlining academies after their fabulous last album “Brothers”, released only 18 months ago, to taking on an ambitious feat of headlining three consecutive dates at London’s cavernous Alexandra Palace.
