North American Indie Wednesday – AH-AHHHHHH!…
[Video][Website]
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Alfred Soto: Look — blues riffs!
[5]
Anthony Easton: The Black Keys are a tight, thick rock and roll band who only appear sloppy and messy as either an aesthetic or a marketing choice, but I like sloppiness as an aesthetic choice.
[9]
Mark Sinker: @dubdobdee “late-night party three streets away: odd incidence of wall angles mean sound bounces right into my bedroom window, v.clear & loud — psychedic soul, early funk, psych — on vinyl, sometimes stopping a record half way through — clunk of needle on vinyl, scrape as lifted off — i kinda want to sleep, but the clotted force of this music is so winning — actually must be a tape cz tapespeed fluctuating insanely — so sound of needle crashing down tape also? weird — very obscure learned music collection! daft music to be lying in bed analysing but i cant stop myself… ” That was four nights ago. Whatever the BKeys are getting right about the music of four decades ago, they’re missing the thing that captivated me on Saturday, when I wanted to sleep and and got all fired up for found musicology instead.
[5]
Martin Skidmore: If I had been Danger Mouse, producing this, I’d have taken every trace of them off it. Their blues-rock attempt at reggae is painful to listen to, and DM has never been a person to punch up a rock sound, here providing his customary underpowered job. This lumbers clumsily, with groany vocals and weak, awkward beats. It also has the lamest keyboard break I have heard in a very long time. Rubbish.
[2]
Katherine St Asaph: You can just hear the grasping and gasping and straining in vocalist Dan Auerbach’s attempts to sound bluesy. Really, most of the points here come from Danger Mouse, who pulls a lot of the same tricks he did on Martina Topley-Bird’s The Blue God — the guitar stabs, drum shudders and quivery organ could come right off a B-side. They’d sound better there, too, but you take what you get.
[7]
Chuck Eddy: Gonna take a wild guess that I might be the only Jukeboxer who still checks out and enjoys current white blues-rock albums (2010 favorites so far: Tim Woods’s The Blues Sessions on Earwig and ex-Rational Scott Morgan’s self-titled on Alive Natural Sounds, with others in the running too if they qualify). So, surprise surprise, I’m really relieved this isn’t the hip-hop move that advance notices of the Keys’ new album portended. The guitar and manly low-register vocal parts are still legitimate post-Cream blooze, in ways Jack White couldn’t imagine. But even though I’ve been fooled into thinking they were a real ’70s rock band over a bar speaker system or two, I still hear something underweight in their sound that most Foghat fans wouldn’t buy. A duo’s a duo, and production from Danger Mouse can’t change that.
[6]
Mallory O’Donnell: It takes some serious balls to use “Tighten Up” as a song title, but it takes even seriouser balls to cut a record nowadays in that hoariest of musical genres, white blues-rock. The Keys proceed quite amiably to overwhelm my expectations, although I think they could manage a bit more change-up in the tune without falling into SRV terrain. And I must add that I am slightly disappointed that this isn’t the actual video.
[7]
Rebecca Toennessen: TBK are one of those bands that people assume I like, for some reason. I’ve thought: I should check them out. Then never do. However, I realise that I *do* know this song, I’ve heard and enjoyed it on the radio. It kicks off with the kind of lo-fi jangle that grips me right away. It’s not OMG SO AMAZING, but it’s catchy and sung with genuine feeling – which seems sadly lacking these days. I’m sold.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: I’m not sure grafting on an entirely different song was the solution to the circular going-nowhere nature of the original song, but it certainly made me pay attention for the last couple-dozen seconds. Archie Bell & the Drells would not be proud.
[6]