This is a review of “Brothers” by The Black Keys.

The Black Keys has finally found a mainstream audience with their new album “Brothers.” I’ve heard the album’s single, “Tighten Up,” on the radio and even in car commercials. This level of success comes none too soon, as the band has been putting out high-quality buzzy blues rock albums for years. I’ll admit that when first heard that “Tighten Up” was produced by Danger Mouse, I was a little worried. While I certainly enjoyed Danger Mouse’s production on “The Gray Album” and in the tongue-in-cheek Gnarls Barkley records with Cee-Lo, his production on rock albums tends toward the smooth and orchestral. He polished all the interest off of Beck on “Modern Guilt,” and left the Gorillaz album “Demon Days” overproduced. This fear turned out to be misplaced, as “Tighten Up,” the only song Danger Mouse touched, is as catchy a song as the band has ever released. Danger Mouse’s production does show in the distorted whistling and splashes of organ, but the band’s signature garage rock sound is left largely intact. Furthermore, frontman and producer Dan Auerbach has ensured the rest of the album is still as raw and grungy as ever.
“Tighten Up” is not the only catchy song on this album. For all its fuzzbox guitar, “Brothers” is filled hummable melodies, the best of which is a cover of Jerry Butler’s “Never Give You Up.” The original songs on this album are all simple, bluesy, and timeless, with Auerbach’s vocals providing plenty of interest and variation. Good melodic songwriting is hard to find in contemporary rock, so the transparent songwriting on this album is a breath of fresh air. Auerbach’s vocals and guitar are distorted and low-fi, recalling early garage and psychedelic rock. Patrick Carney’s drums, on the other hand, are mixed clear and hot, and penetrate through the mix. This gives his drumming a modern, almost hip-hop timbre. The combination of sounds and influences on this album is unique, and leaves The Black Keys in the enviable position of having a sound that doesn’t sound like somebody else.
At their best, in songs like “Next Girl” and “Ten Cent Pistol,” Auerbach’s emotive vocals give the band an electric energy the likes of which I haven’t seen since Son House. The heady “Too Afraid to Love You” is the album’s best showcase of how well his vocals can carry a song. The band does lose this electricity occasionally. The opener “Everlasting Light” seems to meander a little too long, as do “Unknown Brother” and a few other songs later in the album. That said, the album, which is a double LP, stays remarkably tight and focused, despite its length, and these slight drops in energy are small blemishes on an otherwise excellent record.

Soundtrack Review: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World was a love story about Canadian indie rock and video games. Its soundtrack is unsurprisingly built from Canadian indie rock, and was released on a limited edition red LP.  A video game with eight-bit graphics by Paul Robertson was also released, so the film’s makers know their target audience.  Director Edgar Wright, who has proved himself a music lover in the past, worked together with Bryan Lee O’Malley, creator of the original Scott Pilgrim comics, to pick songs for the film.  Many of the songs in the movie, like Plumtree’s “Scott Pilgrim,” inspired O’Malley to write the story in the first place.

Soundtracks and I have had a long, sordid history.  If I notice music in a movie, I’ll often associate the emotional response I had to the movie with the music itself.  As a result, I’ve had everything from mediocre Japanese pop to pounding John Williams insinuate itself into my music library through soundtracks.  The better soundtracks often try to recall their films: the Pulp Fiction and Clerks soundtracks were both peppered with lengthy chunks of dialogue.  Soundtracks like those are essentially mixtapes, made of a wide assortment of preexisting songs.  If there’s an Achilles’ Heel to such soundtracks, it is that you are largely at the whims of the directors’ musical tastes.  Quentin Tarantino may be able to pick interesting songs for a soundtrack, but the music in High Fidelity was so bad that it rendered Cusack’s record-collecting main character unbelievable.  Fortunately, O’Malley and Wright have picked some standout selections for Scott Pilgrim.  “Sleazy Bed Track,” by The Bluetones, is a real hidden gem that I didn’t even notice in the film.  With its organ underpinnings and bluesy guitar work built over what Alex Ross would call a lamento bass line, this song consistently makes me stop what I’m doing to listen to it.  Blood Red Shoes, Broken Social Scene, and The Rolling Stones also contribute solid songs.  These are all good selections – they worked well for the movie, and they work well in the context of the album.  More importantly, they are engaging and listenable even without the larger context of the film.

This is not to say that there is no music written for the film.  There’s plenty of noisy and forgettable background music, a bass battle, a synthesizer battle, and even a Bollywood number penned by Dan the Automator.  Fortunately, all this material was shunted to a second album, dubbed the ‘Original Score’.  There is plenty of original music to listen to on the ‘Soundtrack’ album, all the same.  Beck was enlisted to compose music for Pilgrim’s band Sex Bob-Omb, and Broken Social Scene wrote two tantalizingly short songs for Pilgrim’s rivals Crash and the Boys.  These two fictional bands have a very loud, distorted, lo-fi sound in keeping with their roles in the film as underground garage bands.  Their songs sound bad by design, but they are energetic and fun to listen to.  Toronto glam band Metric contributed the guilty pleasure “Black Sheep,” a previously unreleased single, to serve as the performance by the fictional Clash at Demonhead.

The individual songs on this album are almost without exception fun and interesting to listen to.  However, that does not save the album as a whole from sounding more like a mixtape than a conventional album.  Since the album pulls from different bands from different decades, this fate is a hard one to escape.  It’s certainly as interesting and as well-constructed a soundtrack as the Pulp Fiction soundtrack.  Further, I think it benefits from not being burdened with long dialogues to support the album the way Pulp Fiction’s was.  Ultimately, though, this album is for fans of the movie.  If you liked the film, you’ll probably like the album.  If you didn’t see the film, the album is still a serviceable primer on Toronto garage rock, but it’s not going to be the album of the year.