Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 31/03/08
Label: V2

This bare-bones blues thing is all well and good, but it seems that eventually, even the most determined minimalists decide that it's time to add a little flesh to their creation. Hence Jack White's robust four-piece, The Raconteurs, with whom he relaxes outside of the aesthetic straitjacket of The White Stripes. Hence The Kills' latest LP, which adds surprising notes of crunky hip hop and R&B pop to their lean, mean, railroad blues/scuzz-rock/art-punk template. Hence, too, the fifth album from guitarist/vocalist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney.

As The Black Keys, the Ohio duo made their name peddling a raw, groove-based, sensually free-wheeling and agreeably grubby brand of primitive blues-rock cum southern boogie that owed as much to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Free (Auerbach is often a dead vocal ringer for Paul Rodgers) and Creedence Clearwater Revival as to Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. For a moment in 2006, when The Black Keys' filthy, fat riffs were being pumped into millions of unsuspecting homes via that Sony Ericsson TV ad, it even looked like they might be catapulted into the alterno rock stratosphere - however briefly - but it was not to be.

Some of their pay cheque, though, went toward hiring a studio for the first time (home basements have until now served the pair), to fêted sound scientist Danger Mouse as his production fee for "Attack And Release" and to various hired hands. Since Danger Mouse's "thing" is arrangements, he understandably wanted more than just three components (voice, guitar, drums) to arrange and consequently introduced both a bunch of new instruments (organ, banjo, Moog) and various guests - guitarist Marc Ribot, Carney's multi-instrumentalist uncle, Ralph and young, US bluegrass/country chanteuse, Jessica Lea Mayfield - to help ring the changes.

It's not just a matter of bumping up the body count, however. Some of these songs were originally written for a record Danger Mouse was developing with the late Ike Turner, but it quickly became apparent that a new Black Keys album was actually underway. Hence the melodic roundness and subtle, soulful fulsomeness that now sit alongside The Black Keys' trademark gnarly linearity and chunky, insistent drive - neither of which would have suited Turner too well.

That said, stomping, Queens Of The Stone Age-like desert rocker "Strange Times" certainly wasn't written for anyone else, neither was "Remember When, Side B" (equal parts Bo Diddley, Led Zeppelin and The Stooges), nor "Same Old Thing", with its echo of Canned Heat's "Going Up The Country". Danger Mouse hasn't commandeered his charges' muse and forced The Black Keys to change, simply encouraged them to co-operate and collaborate for the first time. Clearly, company becomes them.

    by Sharon O'Connell