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.

Soul Vaccination

As Sasha Frere-Jones points out nicely in the latest New Yorker, there’s something of a soul revival going on.  Frere-Jones has a hard time taking it seriously. Like a lot of people, he really values music that breaks new ground, so any revisitation of older styles strikes him more as gratuitous fandom than legitimate musical expression.  There is a certain validity to that argument: people remember the Bachs, the Beethovens, and The Beatles because they created new modes of musical expression.  Their music holds the imagination precisely because it was so new and so revolutionary.

All that being said, the claim that backward-looking music is of lesser value rings false to me.  We remember Beethoven because his music is still played in concert halls, and The Beatles still top the charts on Last.fm.  Beethoven also idolized Bach, from a century earlier.  Even the Beatles’ White Album featured songs like “Rocky Raccoon” and “Honey Pie“, which were as retro as “Revolution 9” was avant-garde.

There have been many revivals of different types of music, and many good bands have emerged from them over the years.  The garage rock revival spawned bands like The White Stripes and The Hives, while the swing revival launched the careers of the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.  These bands all started looking backward, but have since developed their own unique sounds.  In some ways, they are more revolutionary for drawing their sound from a different source than what is popular at the time.  The songs of Motor City are some of the most memorable and most tuneful in the history of American popular music.  A return to that style of sound could prove to be a shot in the arm for the ailing music industry.  Frere-Jones admits in his article that he was perhaps too hasty in dismissing the work of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.  For my part, I’ll be keeping my eyes, as well as my ears, on the soul revival.

Here are a few videos to put this sound in your ears.  Notice that their visual language is as retro as their sound.

This second video, as you can probably tell from the title, is a bit … blue.  Mind your speakers if there are sensitive ears about.