The Black Keys | Turn Blue
People come to Empty Bottle Evenings to find out about music they haven’t listened to before, and LET ME TELL YOU about this band. It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard. They’ve been around for a little while but…okay everyone knows the goddamn Black Keys. When you’ve reached the point in your career where your songs are sung by thousands of fans at sports stadium, you’re officially one of the biggest bands in the world. Or you’re Kernkraft 400. Nonetheless, for a few years you couldn’t go watch a game without the crowd doing their rendition of “Howling for You” or the PA blasting “Lonely Boy” before tip off. Christ, before Brothers and El Camino, The Black Keys were big, but this was some next level shit. And while every online publication fellated the band from the beginning, Attack & Release (my personal favorite) seemed to push the band beyond the point of no return. They put out Blakroc and turned unsuspecting middle-aged white guys into hip hops fans. No matter what they did, they seemed destined to be bonafide superstars.
They were no longer the darlings of every blogger on the internet. Okay, they still were. But they were also the band on the radio, not just the songs in the background of your video games. The commercials that used their music as their soundtrack were replaced with ads to go see them play live at the biggest venue your state could host. How could El Camino not be a huge hit? I bought the disc (yeah I actually went into a store and bought this thing called a CD) put it in my car and said “Holy Shit”. Now a lot of people had that reaction for both good and bad reasons. But for me it was simple: They did it. Sometimes you hear something once and you just know it’s special. Even if it’s not your favorite, or your style or whatever, you can usually recognize when something has that quality. El Camino has been classified a lot of ways: glam rock, soul, rock n roll, hot garbage. But let’s keep it simple. It was a great POP album; and everything that is included in that loaded musical word applied. Fast, catchy, lyrically meaningless (as admitted by the band themselves), infectious, SIMPLE, fun. No more brooding in your garage with that whiskey. Get up and dance, or at least clap your hands. Hey!
(This could also be a reason why people don’t like this band)
Naturally this album was everywhere. It was too good at what it was to not make the rounds. The bar, the stadium, Kidz Bop probably. You think you were sick of Dan Auerbach singing those tracks, just imagine ten 8-year-olds screeching out “Gold on the Ceiling”. When it first came out it wasn’t overplayed yet (funny how that works) so most people even if they didn’t love the direction they went with on El Camino, appreciated them trying something different. But it gets harder to keep the old faithful happy when the bandwagon is so full you can’t hear yourself think. Personally, after The Big Come Up and ThickFreakness, I was ready for something else. Alright, that’s disingenuous, I didn’t know who the hell the Black Keys were until Rubber Factory, so by the time I started listening to them they were already moving past relying on solely straightforward bluesy garage rock. It was easy for me to accept the more pop offerings they produced over time because were already a band that changed their sound that was music more in my wheelhouse. But for someone who fell in love with The Black Keys because of their bread and butter blues? They were done.
I don’t want to judge these fans. If you marry Hendrix’s Blues, then one day you look in the mirror and see Purple Rain, can you blame them for wanting a divorce? YES! Prince is fucking amazing. Alright, but that’s not the person you married. So, if the changing sound coupled with the next level fame was too much after El Camino, I understand it. But… The Black Keys are still a great band. And why wouldn’t you want to see what happens next? Almost 10 albums, some of them sounding vastly different, but people want to write them off. Now that my niece likes you guys, you’re not cool anymore. Uh, you have a niece, you’re probably too old to be cool anyway. Have you even tried to listen to Turn Blue? At least give it a spin, give them one last shot, the couples counseling if you will, before calling it quits on this band.
(Jesus Christ, you guys are making it hard to defend you)
I listened to the opening track “Weight of Love” and immediately thought two things. 1) I’m glad they didn’t try to make El Camino II, which would have been an understandable move for anyone that enjoys getting filthy rich. 2) I love this fucking song. It’s groovy, trippy, and probably some other 70s words that I don’t know used to describe bass heavy songs like this. It also has the wandering guitar solos that begs for (and receives) fans and critics alike to pull out the psychedelic card. The pace of this song and the album as a whole is much slower, deeper, and yes at times more boring than its predecessor. It’s not another 40 minutes of uptempo pop songs. But it’s not all slow hypnotic jams either; songs like “Fever”(not coincidentally the first single) will give people at their live shows something to clap to without thinking. Which is why the band recorded El Camino to begin with. Those slows jams aren’t stopping people from sitting and texting anymore, BOOM here’s “Dead and Gone”. I guess once you get the bodies out of the seats you want to keep them moving. Bastards.
The latest album wants you to clap, but it allows for some eyes-closed-air-guitaring on breakdowns during songs like “In Our Prime” too. There is nothing raw and noisy on Turn Blue like you would find on the band’s first few albums. No two minute stripped down guitar and drum attack. You’ll find a lot of fleshed out songs with prominent bass and keyboards, and Danger Mouse’s production arguably to the point of overkill. If you’re looking for songs that sounded like (and were) recorded in someone’s basement then yeah, you’re shit out of luck. Actually there are probably a million bands out there that sound exactly like that. Some of them are probably good(link missing). But if you’re one of those weird middle-peak-Black Keys fans like me, buy this album. Sure, it’s moody and has some unnecessary falsetto choruses, but it’s mostly enjoyable and it seems to have lasting value. Alright, it’s at least worth $10. Or fuck it, just steal it from your niece’s computer. They’ve made enough money and she’s probably not too into this one anyway.
Bake
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[…] the first track, “The Weight of Love” alone makes this worth listening to. And really the whole album will grown on you. Or it won’t I don’t even know who you are, but I sure like it. And […]